Compulsion

by Martina Boone

  Barrie dug her phone out of her pocket. No bars. Of course. And screaming wouldn’t help. No one was going to hear them this deep underground.

  She shifted Luke’s wings and name tag into her other hand and dug Twila’s ring and locket out of her other pocket. Holding them all together in her palm, she tried to think. She spun toward the yunwi, who still stood motionless, well away from the door.

  “Do something, can’t you? If you can dismantle shutters and stairs,” she told them, “a lock can’t be any problem.”

  Eight turned toward her. “Who are you talking to?”

  “The yunwi.”

  “They’ve been here all along?” He looked around sharply when Barrie nodded. “Well, even if they are here, I doubt they can go near the door,” he said. “I’ll bet that’s why it’s made of iron in the first place. The screws I took out of the shutter for Pru were galvanized steel, but she had me replace them with iron. She probably thought that would keep the yunwi from working them loose again.”

  Pru had said something to Mary about using iron in place of wooden pegs, and most of the yunwi had fallen back before they’d reached the bottom of the narrow staircase. Iron had to hurt them, if it made them so afraid to touch it or even go near it. The few who had come into the tunnel with her must have been very determined to make sure she found Luke’s and Twila’s bodies.

  Barrie cut the flashlight back to Luke—her great-uncle—and to the girl he had loved. Love had been written in every line of Luke’s body, in the yearning of his spectral fingers as he’d reached out to Twila. Were the two of them back together now? Barrie tried not to imagine that she and Eight might be trapped down here long enough to turn to dust and bones. She played the beam of the flashlight past the bodies, but the floor just faded into darkness.

  “This tunnel has to go somewhere. There has to be a way out.” Barrie shone the light back at Eight.

  His attention sharpened on the wall near the door. “Hold on. Shine the flashlight back over there.”

  Barrie trained the thinning trickle of light on a recess two bricks thick and two feet high. Inside it an old-fashioned lantern hung from a hook, with an age-stained tin box on the ledge below it. Eight picked up the lantern and examined it.

  “That can’t possibly work,” Barrie said. “Come on. We’re better off trying to find an exit before the flashlight dies.”

  “No, look.” He sloshed the oil inside the lantern. “It’s sealed up tight. All we have to do is get it lit, and this is a tinderbox. They did a demonstration with one at the Charleston Museum. They’re not that hard to use.”

  “This isn’t the time for a geek moment,” Barrie said as he opened the box and held up a piece of rock and a wad of yarn scraps.

  “Actually, it’s the perfect time. The flashlight’s going to give out any minute.”

  After placing the yarn into his left hand, Eight struck the flint against the fire steel. A spark lit but missed the yarn. He let out a huff of breath, adjusted the flint, and struck again.

  “I told you it wouldn’t work,” Barrie said.

  But even as she spoke, a curl of smoke rose from the yarn. Eight blew gently to fan it. Barrie pulled the candle out of the tinderbox and tipped the wick into the yarn. It caught with a nose-stinging pppfft and lit the small triumphant gleam in Eight’s eyes. He took the candle from her and used it to light the lantern. The flame guttered, then steadied. Reflecting in the mirror at the back of the lantern, it gave off a surprising amount of light. Eight blew out the candle, turned off the flashlight, and tucked it into the waistband of his shorts. He reassembled the tinderbox before sliding it into his pocket.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  With the light and triumph playing across his features, he looked even more beautiful than usual. Things, and people, were always more beautiful when you were afraid to lose them.

  Barrie’s throat felt raw, and she swept past him. “Man, I hate being underground. Let’s at least hope this tunnel isn’t collapsed like the Colesworth one.”

  “It looks pretty stable. Thomas or whoever went to a lot of trouble bricking it in.”

  “By ‘whoever,’ I take it you mean the slaves?”

  “Why are you mad at me again?” Eight reached out and took her hand as he walked beside her. “I just meant you didn’t have to worry. I know slavery was awful. I just meant that labor-intensive things tend to last. Think of all the building the Romans did underground that has held up all this time. The drinking fountains in Rome still feed from the original ancient aqueducts, which are two thousand years old. What’s three hundred years compared to that?”

  What was seventeen years in comparison? There were so many places Barrie hadn’t been. She hadn’t been anywhere, really. She didn’t even have a bucket list. Dying without a bucket list was worse than dying without finishing one.

  “I want to go to Rome before I die,” she said.

  “Fine. I’ll take you. Or you’ll take me. We can take each other.” Eight squeezed her hand.

  The yunwi milled around them for a while, subdued and harder for Barrie to see in the lantern light. She and Eight had been walking some five minutes before she registered that the tunnel had been sloping gently downward. Now it leveled out, and another lantern hung in a niche cut into the wall. She pulled free of Eight to retrieve it.

  “We’ve probably got enough light already,” Eight said. “Let’s just go. We have to be close to the river by now.”

  “What if the tunnel goes straight under to the other bank?”

  His forehead creasing, Eight peered ahead. “I doubt it. The whole reason for the tunnels would have been to get away during the Yamassee uprising. Or maybe other Indian raids before that. Or away from other pirates, if Thomas was paranoid. He would have wanted to escape on the river.”

  “You’re not escaping if you are still on an island. As long as someone was going to all the trouble of making a tunnel this elaborate, why wouldn’t they go all the way across?”

  “You think it goes to Beaufort Hall?”

  “I doubt it would go to Colesworth Place.” Barrie started limping ahead with renewed determination.

  Twenty yards ahead, the tunnel split. She walked a few steps farther, then paused to picture the geography above-ground. Eight tugged her toward the left. “This way should come out in the Watson woods. Apparently old Thomas believed in hedging his bets.”

  “Hold on.”

  The yunwi weren’t with them anymore. Barrie turned back and found them standing a few yards behind where the tunnel branched, as if they had reached another invisible barrier they couldn’t cross.

  It was absurd to worry about leaving them. But they watched her so forlornly, and she was leaving them locked up here alone in the dark. Not that it would be for long. There had to be two ways out of the tunnel to choose from now. At least one of them was bound to work. Maybe.

  “I’ll come back and let you out,” she told the yunwi, with more confidence than she felt.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The tunnel climbed steeply toward the surface and another iron door, which because of the sharp pitch, was more above them than in front of them. Eight yanked the handle. It didn’t budge. He put his shoulder against the metal, and when that failed, he gave the door a kick. The angle made it impossible to get much leverage. He switched to kicking the iron hinges.

  “You might want to save that foot for walking,” Barrie said, trying to keep her voice from sounding hysterical. “Why don’t we try the other tunnel before you put yourself in a body cast?”

  He kicked one more time, then let her pull him away. He rolled his head on his neck.

  “Feel better?” Barrie asked, wishing she could kick a few things too, but that would have been both pointless and painful.

  Eight spun her toward him and kissed her, a long, deep kiss, until she thought she was going to pass out from lack of oxygen to the brain. “Now I’m better. You?”

  “Yeah. Fan-freaking-tastic.”
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  “Good, because we’re going to get out of this. Look at me.” He ducked his head so he was eye level with her, and laced the fingers of both hands through hers. He spoke so intently, it was hard not to believe him. Not to believe in him. “We will get out.”

  Maybe the human brain was hardwired to require faith. Some people believed in God. Others believed in sports teams. Some believed blindly in their own talent or intelligence, regardless of evidence to the contrary, and then there were those who believed in family no matter how often it betrayed them. The people who mattered were the people you chose instead of the people who were yours only by an accident of birth. Real family was heart as much as, if not more than, blood.

  Barrie had grown so used to the returning click falling into place whenever she and Eight touched each other that she had stopped paying attention to it. But now in the middle of feeling lost, she felt found again. She was choosing him, and she was going to believe in him, and if she ever got out of here, she was going to believe in Pru the way she had always believed in Mark.

  “Yes,” she said, more certainly. “We are getting out.” She pretended she didn’t feel how cold Eight’s hands were in hers.

  They retraced their steps back to the main tunnel, and followed it beneath the river until the floor sloped up again. They passed three more niches containing lanterns, which let Barrie hope that someone who had put so much thought into preparing the tunnel would have thought to leave a spare key for emergencies. She almost had herself convinced it would be there, hanging on an old-fashioned hook beside the door on the Beaufort side. Or maybe the tunnel would come out where Eight’s little sister or his father could hear them if they yelled.

  She and Eight passed another branch in the tunnel that led up toward the river, but in silent agreement they walked straight on. Barrie kept hoping, picturing a ring of keys, imagining a door swinging open into some secret recess of the basement at Beaufort Hall. But the tunnel ended in a very solid oak door reinforced with iron. Eight couldn’t kick it down, and no one answered when Barrie screamed until her throat burned raw.

  She gave up before Eight did, and sank to the floor. The flame from the lantern cast shadows across the bricks, and the vaulted ceiling echoed the boom, boom, boom of Eight’s foot on the door.

  Why couldn’t the wood have been water-soaked and rotten? Or eaten by termites? After three hundred years, a few termites didn’t seem like too much to ask.

  Barrie’s head jerked up. The iron door Cassie had closed at Watson’s Landing and this door at Beaufort Hall were both protected from the elements because they were inside and underground. The door at the end of the branch tunnel Barrie and Eight had followed was still within the boundary of Watson’s Landing. Blood rushed through Barrie’s head while she chased that thought.

  Everything that had been broken at Watson’s Landing, every last thing, had been designed to get her or Pru’s attention. As if the yunwi, whether at the request of the Fire Carrier or the spirits or by their own choice, had been trying to force the Watsons to use the gift and live up to the bargain Thomas had made.

  The yunwi had wanted Luke and Twila found.

  But they hadn’t done any lasting damage anywhere.

  The garden was still in perfect shape. The boards on the dock were sturdy. The roof wasn’t blowing away or sliding off the house. Nothing had fallen on any tourists. No one had been seriously hurt.

  Was it possible that the door at the end of the branch tunnel on the Watson side, maybe all of Watson’s Landing, was protected from decay and rust by magic? Maybe by the same kind of magic that created whatever invisible barriers kept the yunwi on the island?

  There was another door, though. There had to be one at the end of the branch tunnel she and Eight had passed on the Beaufort side of the river. And that door, presumably, wouldn’t be underground or have magical protection. If it had been exposed to air and water all these years . . .

  Barrie scrambled to her feet and took off at a limping run. “Come on! I have to see something.”

  Eight’s sneakers were lighter and quieter on the brick than the heavy Wellingtons she still had on her feet, and his legs were longer. He caught up in a handful of strides. She had a stitch in her side by the time they reached the top of the Beaufort river tunnel, where she could see even at first glance that the oak door was definitely more weathered and water-darkened. Hope relaxed the grim set of Eight’s jaw. He kicked the door, grinning expectantly. But it held.

  Barrie hadn’t realized how sure she had been that it would splinter, until it didn’t. Now they had no more doors—and no more options. What were they supposed to do, just sit here and wait for someone to come find them? No one would have a clue where to begin to look. Eight’s boat was at Watson’s Landing, but Cassie might have done something with that, too. And who knew what kind of lies Cassie would tell to cover her tracks.

  Eight must have come to the same conclusion. He was still kicking the door, with no sign of giving up.

  “It’s not going to break,” Barrie said. “Stop. We should keep movement to a minimum, since we don’t have any water. We need to hold out as long as we can. Give Pru and your dad as much time as possible . . .”

  She couldn’t finish the thought. All she could think of was Pru being trapped at Watson’s Landing again. And Mark, expecting her to be here and never hearing from her.

  She had to think of something.

  Eight slumped against the door and hung his head. Barrie had never imagined he could look defeated. In the sudden quiet, their breaths and the light trickle of sand sifting to the floor were the only sounds.

  There had to be a way out of this. There had to be.

  She glanced at her watch. It was almost ten thirty. Pru would be looking for her by now.

  Eight’s steps scratched on the bricks as he came toward her, and she looked up as he wrapped his arms around her. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and then she couldn’t see anymore. His heart was erratic against her cheek.

  “It’s all going to be fine,” he said.

  “Of course it is. We should go back to Watson’s Landing and wait. And we should bring all the lanterns we can find.”

  “In a minute. I’m still thinking.”

  “Then think fast, would you?” Barrie tried not to imagine their lives measured by an hourglass, marked by the slow whisper of sand. So many hours until the light ran out, so many days until they died of thirst in the darkness.

  Why did she keep thinking of sand? Abruptly she pulled away from Eight and moved to the bricks beside the door. Stooping, she ran her hand across the ground flecked by grit that Eight’s kicking had dislodged from the three-hundred-year-old mortar between the bricks.

  “Give me the flint from the tinderbox, would you?” she asked. “I want to try something.”

  Eight handed her the sharp rock, and she ran it along the mortar. It bit through, and she pressed harder, dislodging more sandy material as the flint dug in and made a narrow trench.

  She paid little attention when Eight’s footsteps receded. Then his voice came from a few yards back, “I thought I’d get another flint, but there’s no tinderbox in this niche. I’m going to go see if I can find one.”

  “Sure.” The word came out a groan, because Barrie was using all her strength.

  She heard Eight light the other lantern. They needed to conserve oil, but on the other hand, if he got the other flint, the work would go twice as fast. She let him go.

  Her knuckles scraped raw against the brick as she dug the flint as deep as it would go into the mortar. Then she switched to using the pointed end of the fire steel to go deeper. That was less successful because she didn’t have the strength to push it through. Deciding to leave that job for Eight, she went back to using the flint. She started on another side of the same brick, working methodically until she’d done as much as she could on all four sides.

  Eight peered over her shoulder when he came back. “Good work,” he said with a nod of approval. />
  “Try using the fire steel to clear out the rest of the mortar where I’ve already done as much as I can do,” Barrie said.

  She stepped aside to let him try it, and he rammed the steel from side to side with pure, brute force, grunting with the effort. Then he suddenly jerked forward.

  “I’m through,” he said, stooping to put his eye to the new void between the bricks. “But I don’t see any light.”

  “Maybe there’s no moon tonight. Keep going.”

  She squeezed in front of him so they could work simultaneously. She felt the rise and fall of his chest, felt the heat of his body, heard the beat of his heart. Her own breath came faster, and not from exertion.

  Grief made you think about sex; she had read that once in a novel. Did fear do that too? Or excitement? Hope? Whichever it was, Eight’s scent, his warmth, his strong jaw and kind eyes suddenly made her want to kiss him almost as much as she wanted to get out of the tunnel.

  “All right,” he said a little later. “I think we need a break.”

  Barrie leaned back into the crook of his shoulder, and let herself pretend this was an adventure, that they were only experimenting to see if they could claw themselves out of a pirate tunnel.

  Except it wasn’t a game. Pru had to be panicking by now. And Mark. What if he had tried to call her back? Barrie attacked the mortar again, faster, harder.

  Her knuckles bled, and so did Eight’s. Drops of blood freckled the floor, and there were no spirits, no shadows to bargain with.

  She and Eight moved a row at a time, working in silence because talking was too much effort. When they had five rows cleared, Eight pulled his arms from around her and nudged her aside. “Stand back.”

  He braced his hands on the wall. Then he kicked the bricks hard, once, twice . . . Where he and Barrie had cleared the mortar, the bricks fell outward and released a stream of mud and decaying leaves that rained back into the tunnel. Barrie jumped out of the way as the debris kept coming, splashing onto the floor and splattering her boots and legs until it finally stopped.

  Eight pushed the lantern through the hole they had made. He poked his head out, but his shoulders didn’t fit. “It’s a covered stairwell. The crud that fell in came through spots where the lid above us has rusted away.”