Black Creek Crossing

by John Saul

  Angel and Seth stood at the top of the stairs that plunged down into the basement. For several long seconds they both gazed into the gloom, and as her eyes reached into the darkness, Angel began to feel something—a strange chill seemed to be emanating from the cellar.

  Seth took her hand. “Do you feel that?” he asked.

  Angel nodded. “It feels like a draft.”

  “But heat rises,” Seth said. “And even when it’s the hottest day of the summer, you don’t feel any cooler till you go down into the basement. Just opening the door at the top of the stairs doesn’t do any good at all.”

  “M-Maybe there’s a window open,” Angel said, not realizing that her voice had dropped to little more than a whisper. “That’s probably how Houdini got in.”

  “Or maybe it’s something else,” Seth replied, his own voice dropping as low as Angel’s. “I read once where it gets real cold when . . .” His words died on his lips as the chill suddenly evaporated. When he looked at Angel, he could tell that she felt the sudden change too. “It’s gone,” he breathed.

  Angel once again peered down into the darkness below. “Houdini?” she called. “Come on, Houdini! Come out of there!”

  The cat appeared at the bottom of the stairs, its eyes glowing in the light spilling down from the kitchen, but it did not come up. Instead it meowed again.

  “Come on!” Angel said. “You’ll get filthy down there.”

  The cat meowed once more, then disappeared.

  “Houdini!” Angel said. She groped for the cellar light switch, found it and turned it on. A bare bulb in the center of the cellar ceiling went on, but its dim glow revealed no sign of the cat.

  Then it meowed again, louder.

  “What’s going on with him?” Seth asked. “It’s like he wants us to come down—” He fell silent as he gazed at the cellar stairs. “What if we were looking under the wrong stairs?”

  Angel stared at Seth. “He’s a cat, Seth! What—”

  As quickly as it had vanished, the cat reappeared at the bottom of the steps, meowed loudly, then bounded up most of the stairs. But before it reached the top, it veered off to the right, bounding off the step and dropping to the floor below.

  And meowed one more time.

  “Let’s go down and see,” Seth said.

  Angel said nothing, but when Seth took the first step down the steep flight of stairs, she hung back. “Maybe we shouldn’t go down there,” she said as Seth looked back at her.

  “Or maybe we should,” Seth countered, putting just enough emphasis on the word so Angel knew exactly what he meant.

  She felt the challenge hanging in the air, and gazed down into the shadows below. As she peered into the gloom, the memories of the last few nights flicked through her mind.

  The girl in the closet, surrounded by flames.

  The smell of smoke still lingering in the morning.

  The presence in her room the night before last, when someone had loomed over her in the darkness, reaching out to her, wanting to touch her.

  The sound of the piggy bank crashing to the floor.

  And then, the scrawled image on the mirror that she had scrubbed away until there was no trace of it left at all.

  A smudge like blood.

  The blood of the girl who’d died in the room in which she now slept?

  No! It wasn’t blood—it was only lipstick, and it had washed away. Everything she’d seen had only been dreams, and there weren’t any such things as ghosts.

  “All right,” she said, trying not to let any of her fears creep into her voice. “Let’s go down and see.”

  Without waiting for Angel to reply, Seth headed down the stairs, and a second or two later Angel followed.

  “There’s another light at the bottom,” she whispered when they were halfway down. “You have to pull a string.”

  As they came to the last step, Seth reached up, grabbed the string, and pulled. A dim light came on, washing most of the darkness away, but leaving the far recesses of the cellar lost in shadows. They found Houdini under the stairs, which were made of thick oak slabs about the size of the mantel upstairs, mounted on even bigger oak beams, laid in a steep slant with notches cut in them to support the steps. The upper surfaces of the steps were worn smooth—and somewhat concave—from the generations of feet that had tramped up and down them. But on the underside there were still the marks of the hand tools that had hewn and shaped them so long ago.

  Houdini was standing on his hind legs, his forepaws propped against the fourth step, his head stretched high, but his nose still falling short of the fifth step.

  As Angel and Seth crouched down to gaze at him, he looked at them, meowed, then stretched upward once again.

  “What’s he doing?” Angel asked. “What’s he want?”

  Angel and Seth moved around behind the stairs, then looked up at them from below. Except for a few places where light showed through the tiny gaps between the treads, they saw only darkness.

  “Have you got a flashlight?” Seth asked.

  “In the kitchen drawer,” Angel replied. She hurried up to the kitchen, and opened the top drawer at the end of the counter, where only two days ago she herself had put the contents from the catchall drawer in Eastbury. The flashlight was at the front, exactly where she’d put it.

  Back in the cellar, she found Seth crouched down next to the cat, which was still standing on its hind legs, stretching toward the stair that was just out of reach while mewing insistently. As Angel crouched beside Seth and shined the light up at the underside of the stairs, Seth rapped sharply on the three steps nearest the cat.

  Twice, they heard nothing but the faint thump of solid wood.

  Then he rapped on the fifth step from the bottom.

  As his knuckles came in contact with the wood, the sound was much louder, with a resonance to it that made Angel’s heart begin to pound.

  It sounded hollow!

  Seth looked at her, then knocked on the tread once more.

  The same sound.

  And the cat, apparently now satisfied, moved out from under the stairs, sat down, and began grooming itself.

  Seth knocked on the tread above and the tread below, and each time they heard only the same solid sound they’d heard on the rest of the stairs.

  Seth went back to the fifth one and began rapping along its entire length.

  At each end, it sounded as solid as the adjoining treads. But for six or eight inches in both directions off the center, it had that hollow sound that told them that this tread, at least, was not solid all the way through.

  Angel held the flashlight closer while Seth examined the step more carefully. At first he saw nothing, but then, as he looked closer, something didn’t look quite right at the point where the tread sat upon the supporting beams. Taking the flashlight from Angel, he held it even closer to the joint, then shifted it first to the one above, then the one below. Though the fits were almost perfect, he was sure he could make out a tiny horizontal gap between the treads and the beams, where the treads were sitting on the notches cut out of the beams to act as risers. But in the fifth step it looked as if the joint went up, as if somehow the tread were suspended between the main beams instead of being supported by the notches.

  Moving out from under the steps, he examined the end of the fifth tread. From the outside it appeared to be seated atop the notches in the two slanting beams, exactly like all the rest. Frowning, he tapped on the surface of the riser.

  It sounded like solid wood.

  “What is it?” Angel asked. “Is it hollow or not?”

  “It’s weird,” Seth told her. “It doesn’t sound the same from underneath, and it doesn’t look the same either.”

  “Let me see.”

  With both of them crouching under the stairs now, Seth showed Angel the strange joints. Reaching up, Angel gently rapped on the underside of the tread and heard the same hollow sound Seth had. She frowned, trying to figure out why the joints would look different
from below than from the end, and a moment later the answer came to her. “Hold the flashlight,” she told Seth. He took it from her, and she pressed the palms of both her hands up onto the bottom of the fifth tread, then pulled them toward her. For a second she thought nothing was going to happen, but then—just as she was about to give up—she felt a slight movement. Pressing even harder, she pulled again, and for a moment it seemed as if the entire tread was moving toward her.

  “Wow,” Seth breathed. “Look at that!”

  Angel kept easing the wood forward, until Seth, who was crouched down low so he could peer up at the bottom of the tread, said, “Hold it—I see something!”

  “What?” Angel asked.

  “It’s like the whole back and bottom of the tread is fake,” he said, poking his fingers up into some kind of cavity that had appeared in the bottom of the tread. A second later, his voice trembling, he whispered, “There’s something in it. See if you can pull it a little farther.”

  Angel reached back so her fingertips curled around the edge of the false bottom, and she pulled. The panel slid stiffly for a moment, then suddenly came loose, sliding entirely free of the tread.

  Something dropped from the cavity that had been concealed above the sliding panel, falling into Seth’s hands.

  Neither of them said a word, but simply stared at the object. It was a book, bound in leather that was embossed with faded gold lettering. The letters were so ornate that even if the gilt had not all but vanished, neither of them could have made out what they said. Though the leather of the cover looked almost new, there was still something about it that told them it was far older than it appeared.

  And its color was exactly the same as the color of the lipstick Angel had found on the floor that morning, and on her fingers, and on the sheets.

  Red.

  Bloodred.

  Chapter 22

  ET’S TAKE IT UPSTAIRS, SO WE CAN AT LEAST SEE IT,” Seth said. “And so I can stand up straight too,” he added, awkwardly scuttling out from under the stairs and standing up to stretch the muscles that had begun to ache as he crouched beneath the steep staircase.

  Houdini rose to his feet too, stretched, then darted up the stairs to the kitchen.

  Angel paused only long enough to replace the sliding panel that hid the compartment carved out of the bottom of the fifth stair. Fitting the two dovetailed tongues on the panel into the matching grooves on the stair step, she pushed it forward until it was exactly as they’d found it a few minutes ago. Shining the light on it one more time to make certain that nothing betrayed its secret, she turned off the two basement lights and followed Seth up to the kitchen, where he was standing at the table, staring down at the book.

  Houdini was on the kitchen table, sniffing at it, and as Angel came near, he looked up at her, placed his right forepaw on the volume, and mewed softly.

  In the full light of day, the cover looked even redder, but they could also clearly see how old it was. The gilt was all but gone on the ornate symbols, and though the leather itself was uncracked, parts of its polished surface were worn to the texture of suede. Seth was about to open it when Houdini whirled to face the front of the house, his back arched and the hairs on his body standing on end.

  As a hiss of warning erupted from the cat’s throat, Seth yanked his hand away from the book.

  “What’s wrong with him?” he asked, staring at the cat. “He’s acting like he’s going to bite me!”

  “It’s not you,” Angel said. “It’s my dad! I hear his car!”

  Seth’s eyes widened. “Maybe we better put the book back!”

  “And have him find us in the basement? He’d want to know what we were doing!” Her eyes flicked around the kitchen. “Where can we hide it?”

  Seth picked up the book, shoved it in his backpack, and headed toward the back door. “Come on!”

  Waiting only long enough to return the flashlight and grab her own backpack so her father wouldn’t know she’d been home, Angel darted out the back door just as she heard the roar of the old Che-velle’s engine cut off. She caught up with Seth as the car door slammed, and when her father would have gotten to the front door, they were running down a narrow path that wound into the forest. By the time her father might have glanced out the back window, they were deep enough into the woods that he wouldn’t be able to see them at all.

  And Houdini was with them every step of the way.

  “Where are we going?” Angel asked when Seth finally slowed down.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Have you ever come back here since you moved in?” Angel shook her head. “This path leads to the old crossing, where the ferry used to be.”

  Suddenly, Houdini let out a howl, then veered off the narrow path, heading into the trees.

  “Houdini!” Angel called. “Come back!”

  The cat paused, looked back, meowed, then continued moving deeper into the woods.

  “Where’s he going?” Angel asked.

  Seth shrugged. “How should I know? But I’m not going with him—there isn’t even a path there.”

  Turning away, he started once more along the path that led to Black Creek Crossing. Angel, after another anxious glance at the cat, followed.

  Less than half a minute later Houdini appeared on the path a few yards ahead of them. Once again his back was arched and he was hissing and spitting.

  Seth stopped so fast that Angel almost bumped into him. “Jeez, what’s wrong with him?” He took a step toward the cat, but jerked back when the cat’s paw shot out, swiping at his leg.

  Angel stooped down and extended her hand, but once again the cat took a swipe with his paw.

  “Maybe he’s rabid,” Seth suggested.

  Angel rolled her eyes. “He was fine a minute ago.”

  “Then let’s just go around him.” Seth stepped off the path, starting around Houdini.

  The cat moved, blocking his way, and hissed again.

  Seth moved the other way.

  The cat countered, hissing angrily.

  “All right, all right,” Seth said, holding up his hands and backing off. He turned to Angel. “So now what do we do? Your dad’s back at your house, and your cat won’t let us down the path.”

  Then Houdini was at Seth’s feet, rubbing up against his legs as if nothing had happened. Seth stared down at the cat, mystified. “What’s going on?” he asked Angel. “Is he crazy?”

  “How should I know? He’s not my cat!”

  But now Houdini was rubbing up against her legs as well, and a moment later he bounded back down the path the way they’d come, but stopping a few yards away to turn, mewing plaintively.

  When neither Angel nor Seth moved, he darted toward them, meowed, then turned back.

  “If he was a dog, I’d think he wants us to follow him,” Seth said. “But cats don’t do that, do they?”

  Now it was Angel who shrugged. “Maybe we should try it.” She glanced around at the dense forest of maples and oaks and pines. “What if we get lost?”

  “I’ve been poking around here all my life,” Seth told her. “I’ve never gotten lost yet. Come on—let’s at least try it.”

  Houdini stayed on the path until they came back to the point where he’d left it a few minutes ago, and once again he veered off, pausing a few yards into the woods and looking back as if to see whether Angel and Seth were following.

  “Are you sure we won’t get lost?” Angel fretted.

  “We can’t—the road’s a few hundred yards to the left, and the creek’s off to the right. No matter where that stupid cat goes, we’ll be able to find one of them or the other.”

  They followed the cat as it moved through the woods, down a path neither of them could see. But the cat nevertheless seemed to know where it was going. After a few minutes they came to the creek, which was no more than twenty feet wide, and shallow enough that many of the rocks lining the bottom cleared the surface and were close enough together to act as stepping-stones across. The stream ran
through a channel at least ten times wider than it, and Seth thought it was almost ten feet deep.

  “Does it ever flood?” Angel asked as she gazed at the meandering stream.

  “Not anymore,” Seth told her. “In the spring it might get to be four feet deep, but that’s all. Most of the water goes into a bunch of reservoirs, and they only let enough out to keep the fish alive.”

  “Where was the ferry?”

  “Back up that way,” he said, pointing upstream. “It was like a barge, and there was a rope strung across the river, and the barge guy would haul the barge back and forth.”

  A few minutes later the cat turned away from the stream again, and the forest seemed to get thicker.

  “Do you know where we are?” Angel asked.

  “Pretty much,” Seth replied. “If we lose Houdini, I can find my way back to the stream. Then it’s easy.”

  “But where are we going?”

  “How should I know? I guess we’ll just have to follow and find out.”

  Stepping over a fallen limb, he hurried after the cat. Angel followed him, and moments later they came upon what looked like a path, though it was so overgrown as to be barely visible. As they moved along it, the path narrowed and the trees crowded in, and Angel had to crouch low to get under several branches. The terrain began to get rougher, with granite outcroppings thrusting up, and twice the path disappeared completely.

  “Are you sure we’re not lost?” she asked as they came into a small open space in front of a bluff of deeply fissured granite.

  “I sort of know where we are, but there’s nothing out here,” Seth told her.

  Angel scanned the area but didn’t see anything except a small clearing, and beyond that the granite face of the bluff. Still, she followed Seth as the cat moved across the clearing and picked its way over the mound of granite that had fallen from the face of the bluff over the centuries. Now there was no sign of a path at all, and Angel had no idea where they were anymore, even in relation to where they’d come from or even the stream. Then Seth stopped, and a second later Angel caught up with him.