“There could be. They still find treasure, they haven’t found it all.”
“There could be sea turtles the size of Buicks resting down there, too.” A.G. turned to him. “What do you think? What’s it for, that room? Fallout shelter maybe, at one time?”
Ruth said, “Escape route for the Underground Railroad? I bet that’s what it is. This is old. Cool.”
“Yeah,” A.G. said, smirking. “But the Underground Railroad didn’t actually go underground, Ruth.”
“Choo-choo.” She giggled. “Yes, it did, in some places.”
Debbi took his hand and interlaced fingers. He hoped he could siphon some of her excitement into himself, but none of it wore off. He shook his head and stared into her smile. And that, for the moment, satisfied him, despite the fact that he knew there was more to come, so much of the unknown here besides all his love for her. Still, he wished he didn’t care about all this—this game of hers, this adventure that the others didn’t know was already too real, as she poo-pooed him every time he tried to speak seriously, as A.G. got him into a headlock whenever he mentioned anything about the darkness. He was nearly certain they concealed something from him as much as from themselves.
The trapdoor had been camouflaged beneath a number of slates that covered the outer edges of the lighthouse’s base. It was shabby in design, almost as if put down as an afterthought, in order to make the interior more attractive, or to provoke another arcane pattern. The slabs had split, shards scattered.
“What cracked the tiles?” A.G. asked, taking a flashlight from his backpack at the edge of the room and shining it down the stairwell. The light barely pierced the gloom. “I was afraid of that. This cheap thing isn’t nearly strong enough. Somebody go out to my bike and get my father’s lantern. I forgot to bring it in with me. That sucker can light up Etcher’s Point.”
Ruth checked over A.G.’s left shoulder and Debbi stared from his right. The three of them peered into the blackness, only the barest hint of the scrawlings, signs, and badges seen as the beam from the flashlight panned this way and that.
He went to retrieve A.G.’s father’s lantern, shoving hard against the front door, the ineffective chains rattling but not holding the door shut. He realized in a brilliantly rational moment, too crystalline for truth perhaps, that he was free. He had made it out, and he could leave. Staring out at the surf, a strange and solemn thought pervaded: I want to go home. It confused him now, whether he should run, until he wondered just what home he wanted to go back to, and where it could be found. He hurried across the sand and swung A.G.’s handlebars around the other way so he could unload the lantern, then returned. He stood a moment in the shade of the catwalks above, knowing he was going to go back in, for her, of course, but more than just her, he wanted to go all the way in for himself.
He handed A.G. the lantern. Ruth grabbed A.G.’s hand and angled the flashlight, and now the lantern beam, too, against the walls of the stairway.
“What are all these marks?” she asked.
“Is that the writing you were telling us about? The runes? What’d you call them, sigils?”
Ruth kneeled on the tile, reached out, and touched the nearest sign. “Cool, funky digs, what language is it in? What’s it say? Can you read it?”
“Who cares?” Debbi said. “Come on, this is boring! Let’s go and get on with it.” She flipped on her own flashlight. “The worst thing that happens is there’s an earthquake and we all get sucked into a river of molten lava.”
“Well …” Ruth said. “That won’t hurt much.”
Glancing back, A.G. said, “We set?”
“If you are,” Ruth answered, “but wait a sec, I didn’t bring anything. Give me your flashlight.” With considerable effort, she finally managed to shove the switch up. “Okay, I’m ready, Griddly.”
Holding the lantern before him like a lance, A.G. descended first. Ruth held on to the back loop of his belt and followed, the powerful shaft of lantern light playing wildly across the pictures carved into the rock, flashlight beams weaving like lost souls gliding. Debbi went next, virtually skipping into the darkness, tra la la la as she wound down the stairway. He followed her, reaching forward and clasping a hand around her wrist, because he’d turned the keys in all of these locks, and would learn the meaning and price of this particular brand of madness. He counted on it.
“Don’t be such a baby,” she chastised him, but tightly held on to his hand.
Their feet dragged against the rock, Ruth’s sandals making an awful racket. Debbi shivered with jubilant energy. She was always so damn bored. He’d tried several times to explain what the runes meant, and she’d called him grisly and creepy, still searching for her father out at sea. Is that what she hoped to find here in the cave, some remainder of him?
Crrrt, Ruth’s sandals went against the stone as they descended. Crtt crtt, her footsteps fell.
“You were right about one thing, Ruth,” A.G. said. “No way is this a fallout shelter.”
“How many times have you guys been down here?” Ruth asked.
No one else had been down here the way they were now.
Debbi played her fingers up and down his wrist as the sweat of their palms began to loosen their grip on each other. “I’ve been down twice, but only to the bottom of the steps. It’s more fun to explore the caves now, with all of you.”
“Yay, fun.” A.G. couldn’t help keep the reality of awe from his mocking voice. “Yay, if we meet any subterranean troll people down here do you think they’ll worship us like gods because of our advanced scientific knowledge?”
“Caves?” Ruth said. “I guess I wasn’t really listening when you said that before. That’s impossible, we’re at the beach, there can’t be any natural caves here. Whoever heard of such a thing? Maybe just an alcove.” Now at least Ruth picked up on it, as he muttered more spells under his breath, so low yet still so powerful, feeling the arcana that thrived here almost reaching out.
“There can be a cave, can’t there?” Debbi said. “What are you talking about? Where do you think the pirates hide all their treasure on them desert islands?”
A.G. stopped short. “Be careful you don’t trip. That’s the final step, and the last four or five are smaller than the rest and all jammed together. God, we’re down far. This is kind of freaky. I counted one hundred eleven.”
“Me, too,” Debbi said. “Last time.”
“That’s what?” Ruth asked. “Something like eighty feet maybe?” She reached and took a handful of Debbi’s hair, pulled it gently, and flipped it back, her hair always everywhere, merging with the darkness. “I can’t believe you came down here alone. Why, Deb?”
“Why not?”
“That’s a reason?”
“Sure, it’s the best one.”
A.G. turned the lantern to his face and the glow lit him in eerie penumbra, none of them realizing the extent of these shadows. “Stay together, everyone, this was very stupid of us. There’s no way we can explore, we’d be lost in a second.” His voice snapped around them all, echoing. “Jeez, this is much bigger than I thought. Nobody ever mentioned anything like this.” The powerful beam of light arched and faded into the depths without showing anything more.
“It looks kind of different,” Debbi said. “Why’s it so dark? It wasn’t this dark before, not really. You could see the cracks in the walls, but that’s it.”
“This isn’t a cave. Listen to how far those echoes go. It’s a cavern. There might even be catacombs.”
“Oooooh,” Debbi went.
“Ruth, keep holding on to my belt.”
Ruth nodded resolutely. “I ain’t letting go.”
A.G. looked at him, reached back, and said, “You were reading that book on numbers the other day, I remember. Called Numerology, right? One eleven. Do you think there’s a significance to that?”
“What’s that rumbling sound?” Ruth asked.
Debbi said, “Lava?” She burst out laughing, the sweet and high titterin
g warbling into the distance and whipping back at them from every angle.
A.G. drew his hand along the rock, finally starting to feel what had to be felt, his other senses opening. It was clear, just look around. He understood, to some extent, what they were entering. “That’s spooky. I think it’s the ocean beating against the walls.”
“It’s so loud, like giant lungs.”
“It’s Goliath,” Debbi said. “That little wimp David didn’t do the job after all.”
“The waves.”
“Shine the floor,” Ruth said.
A.G. did.
“Look at that,” Debbi whispered. “Hey, now we’re getting somewhere.”
From between the scattered ugly drawings and odd designs on the floor rose stalagmites of all sizes, some cylindrical and others sharply tipped like icicles extending upward. It was unnatural here, like this, like his father killing his mother. A mindless merging of earth and perverse artistry.
Ruth gasped.
Debbi said, “We’ll come back with more lanterns, and miner’s caps, and sacks for the loot. Rope lines so we don’t get lost, and we’ll chalk our path across the floor.”
A.G. shook his head and carefully swept the area around him with the light. “Miner’s caps, huh? Somebody’s already marked up the floor. But why? What does it mean?” A.G. turned to him now, expecting an answer, but seemed undisturbed when he didn’t get one. Water dripped nearby. “Hold hands and form a single line. Spread out as far as you can without losing the stairs. Watch out for these rocks.” When they were as far into the cave as they could go without losing contact with the stairway, A.G. illuminated the path they’d chosen.
And they saw it.
There. Only a dozen feet away. Untouched for so many years because no one else had been able to unlock the labyrinth.
The four of them stared at the altar.
Ruth shivered. “Is that a painting of a goat on the floor?”
It was Baphomet, looking alive, its blind malfeasance now turning an eye toward them. Oh God. His grip tightened on Debbi’s hand, and he tugged her. He may have even tugged her forward.
“We’d better get out of here,” A.G. told them, beginning to back up.
“I’m with you,” Ruth said. “I want out. Look at that sicko thing. It’s got a dick.”
Yes, look at it, that’s what they’d come here for, to find what had been forgotten, searching for Debbi’s dad, looking for his own father here too, and all the other answers. He heard a sound to his left.
Something shoved him forward, or he tripped, and his heel lost contact with the bottom stair. He entered the darkness, and, however briefly, welcomed the invitation. He tried to keep his balance and grabbed on to Debbi, but again it felt like he was pushed.
“Hey,” Debbi said as her hand was torn from his. “What the hell are you—?”
Chapter Nineteen
Now it had come to this, and Charters found it more pleasant than he’d ever imagined.
Rather than becoming either manic or depressed—which he had a penchant for—he remained at rest. Intense cold helped to contain and calm his thoughts as he sat huddled and shivering on the frozen ground, hands thrust deep into his pockets as the wind rose furiously and the rain thrashed.
Sitting Indian-style in the mire and weeds of her grave made Charters feel like a teenager again; it was the sort of jejune romantic gesture that a sensitive seventeen-year-old boy would feel compelled to make in order to seal a pact with love. He only felt sorry that it had taken him so very long to understand how out of touch with this life he had become, to realize that the hold she had on him even now, after all these years, was not something to be ashamed of feeling. Frigid air made crying difficult; the rims of his nostrils felt sliced by razors. Sentimentality used emotional crowbars to pry up every buried and half-covered passion.
And yet perhaps this too was exaggeration, but the moment called for it. He reached into the mud, hoping to come to terms with such aggrandizement. Go on, what the hell do you have to lose? Live a little. Wax poetic. This was a perfect time for such youthful hyperbole and melodrama, in the shadow of his life. Especially when you considered that he was now making the supreme overstatement.
He hoped someone else would fully consider this to be his reasoning; Richard Karragan, the M. E., was the one friend who might. It truly was like being thirty years younger again, when his desire grew to be more than he could control, but still he managed to handle it well, he thought. Feeling so wonderfully alive.
The irony, of course, was quite apparent at the moment. Mud ran down the banks of the hills and flowed into an eddy at the base of the woods below. Rain drove past his hat and into the collar of his coat, like the tongues of his wives.
After they’d found A.G.’s cell empty there had been a long and jarring beat in the air. A rupturing of the minute as several events came together for a precise fit in Charters’s mind. He instantly and quite placidly accepted truths previously unacceptable, and felt damn good in doing so. Like finally facing the bully who’d chased you around the school yard for years.
Charters simply turned to get his first unclouded look at what he’d been running from.
Hodges, though, stuck to the facts and his hatred, checking videotapes and ranting the way you’d come to expect from the bitter sheriff, borderline himself and a hairs breadth from a complete nervous crackup. Hodges slapped his gun belt a lot, and Charters was afraid there would be a shoot-out between the police and the thin-lipped hospital guards. How the sheriff hated A.G., the fury just another element thrown into this case, everyone’s anger, spite, and frustration playing meaningful parts. Charters had been surprised that he hadn’t been arrested. Sheriff Hodges hissed savagely, suggesting that the doctor had let him go.
But Charters hadn’t let A.G. go free any more than he’d allowed himself to be released from the asylum.
The tape revealed nothing; another glitch, and this time Charters grinned, understanding, in a fashion, what was at work here. Nothing except wafting fog figures and static-filled smoke that sent shudders through him, because there were faces to be made out in the picture, if you searched for them. Charters ran and checked Richie Hastings’s room to find the boy awake and alert, and telling the nurses he was hungry for something called a Garbage Deluxe Krunchburger. To see the boy animated and stable proved to be at least as amazing as having watched the once amicable A.G. so silent and deranged in his own way.
Charters was glad that, in the end, A.G. had let the kid go.
Lightning creased the sky. Charters sneezed and shook, rain beginning to annoy him. His backside slid a bit in the mud of her grave, his fingers clawing into the dirt. He could remember how good it once felt to be this close to her years before, regardless of their surroundings, regardless of reason, loyalty, ethics, honor, or essential sanity. In the rouge light of those early mornings he would dismiss the nurses and watch her in her cell, dancing with invisible angels, mashing her kisses against the soft walls until he broke into sobs. Her passions remained unhindered by the straitjacket—arms twisted about her shoulders, head thrown back in some unfulfilled, unfathomable howl—and still, with his chest racked with the weeping, he could feel only love and total resignation to that love. He smashed things in her name, running through the streets before dawn and throwing rocks through his neighbors’ bay windows. Christ, how he’d often cursed every aspect of this existence, from his grandfather to God, and back again, to himself and his wives and pets and patients.
He’d handed her the poison in a teacup, china he’d stolen from her husband. There was poetry in that, he believed.
She took it daintily, and when she’d finished drinking he thought—he hoped, oh holy God in Your Heaven, he had to have faith—that she’d mouthed, Thank you. He prayed for this to be true above all other truths, but perhaps it was actually only another part of his warped and lonely, hollow fantasies.
“I love you,” he’d whispered as she fell back into his arms. She gag
ged and coughed, but there didn’t seem to be much pain. She reached and touched his face with the backs of her fingernails, before she closed her eyes and the sweetness of her breath blew one last time into his face, and she died for him, for him, only for him, at last. He repeated it now to her gravestone. “I love you.” More words unbridled themselves, but he didn’t want to taste them, because now came a gush of honesty that he wanted to hold away—everything couldn’t come up. Let it be over before then, please.
But he didn’t stop, his voice sounding so unlike himself he almost imagined he, this man in the mud, was not Henry Charters. “You understand now, don’t you? I had to do it, darling. I loved you too much to see you rot in this hell.”
Yes, that was good, he could survive intact with that, his soul remaining at large, as long as he shut up now. He saw so much inside his mind, and couldn’t stop himself. “I had to do it. He might have cured you.”
The disease.
The disease is love.
Dr. Henry Charters, former husband and one-time best friend, traitor, hypocrite, adulterer, and director of this madhouse, laughed briefly and sighed, placed the shotgun under his wet chin as the wind stole his hat, and blew the top of his head, all over Potter’s Field.
Chapter Twenty
Jazz spritzed his ex-wife Bobbi May with a seltzer bottle, and she yelled, “Asshole!”
To say that everyone who was anyone showed up at Bosco Bob’s parties wouldn’t be fair to the nobodies. Considering the narrow strata of hierarchies, it proved to be virtually everybody. Everyone was there whether they were someone or not, no one or not.
How could you miss out on Big Bosco Bob’s parties? You couldn’t. How could you not feel inclined to go? Everybody he knew crammed into the mansion, so that the place now writhed like the town itself, thrumming with the same life and heat, and the underpinnings of every secret of Summerfell. This was a tradition, he invited and they went, what did anyone else have better to do on a Saturday night?
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