Jill tried to respond, but her words were garbled and unintelligible because of the gummy mass in her mouth. This only made the two of them laugh harder. The video ended.
Darger chuckled softly to herself and found herself wondering what it would have been like to have a dad like Luck. Someone who was there. Someone who gave a shit. Someone you could laugh to the point of tears with over some gummy bears.
She set her phone on the bedside table and turned out the lamp. Settled her head back onto the pillow.
In the darkness, her mind wandered back to trying to solve this morbid puzzle. The images flashed through her head. Starved bodies. Dumpsters. Tattoos. Weird cults.
Tomorrow they’d know more, she reminded herself. They’d drive out to the cult grounds and ask some questions. She felt a twinge of excitement just thinking about it.
She didn’t think she’d be able to sleep, but less than two minutes after the lights went out, unconsciousness pulled her under.
Chapter 17
The cowboy dragged Cora back out into the halls of the murky house, a handful of her hair in one hand and the knife in the other. He gripped her hard enough to slant her head at an odd angle away from him, chin tilted upward, neck stiff. Pain radiated from the back of her scalp where the hair was pulled rigid, stinging in strange flickering patterns like an electrical current circulated in the pale skin there.
Even with the hurt and fear, she focused. Eyes darting everywhere. Seeing everything. She needed to take in her surroundings. Note the details. Mentally record the floor plan. If any kind of escape became possible…
They shuffled down the hall, moving vaguely toward the glow of the foyer light in the distance. Cora’s eyes widened at the brief glimpses of the door she could make out from the corner of her eye. Freedom was so close, even if it did her no good.
Then they veered left, passed through the kitchen again, those stainless steel appliances once again huddling in the shadows around them. Bulky shapes in the dark.
The cowboy kicked open a door set into the back wall of the kitchen. That prissy looking boot rising and thrusting. Then he leaned into the darkness beyond the doorway and flicked a light switch.
The fluorescent glow took a second to arrive. The bulbs humming and buzzing as they came to life.
And then the wooden staircase took shape, leading down into a basement.
Cora’s eyes went wider still. The cellar. Not good.
She stopped her feet just shy of the threshold. Refused to walk forward.
He changed his grip on the back of her hair. Jerked her in front of him and thrust her forward with a lifting motion.
“Walk or fall,” he said. “Like I fucking care.”
The sensation of being pushed and lifted at the same time reminded her of being in a mosh pit, totally at the whims of the surging crowd around her.
His new grip was lower on her head, moving down toward the scruff of her neck. The pulled hair stung more sharply here, but as a trade-off she’d regained the ability to angle her head downward. That helped her see enough to place her feet from step to step, avoiding that face first plunge to the smooth gray concrete floor below.
At the bottom of the steps, they veered to the left. The fluorescent bulbs buzzed louder here. Shimmered splotches on the matte gray paint coating the floor.
The basement was vast and clean. Industrial. Machines lined the walls. Commercial grade embroidery machines or sergers, Cora thought. She didn’t know what to make of that.
The cowboy moved up beside her, and she turned to look at him for the first time since they’d left the office. What she saw made her gasp.
His ponytail had slipped down, half falling out of the back of his cowboy hat. It now looked like it sprouted out of his lower neck. A wig? She didn’t know what that could possibly mean, but the image creeped her out worse than before.
He seemed to sense her gaze and fixed the hat. Sliding both it and the wig back up with a single motion. Something he’d done before, she thought.
She struggled then. Threw her head forward. Tried to rip free of his grip while he was distracted.
He ground his knee into her back. Wrenched her shoulders backward with both hands. The blade now touched the skin along her larynx ever so faintly. He forced her down to the ground that way, his touch taking her straight to the floor.
She squirmed. Tried to buck and almost swim her way away from him.
One kick to the ribs sucked all the fight out of her. The steel toe of the boot pounded into her side with a sound like a meat tenderizer flattening a chicken breast.
She curled up into a ball. Eyes squeezed shut. Breathing. Watching a yellow light flicker at the bottom of her field of vision.
“Almost wouldn’t respect you if you didn’t at least try,” he said. “Once is enough, though. Try it again, and I’ll give your throat the same deal ol’ boy upstairs got. Slashing prices, you could say. I’ll give you a second to get your wind.”
When she opened her eyes a few beats later, he gestured for her to stand. She got to her feet.
They walked to the far corner of this industrial space, his hand now wrapped around her arm. Fingers warm.
Her heart thundered in her chest. Blood roared in her ears. But what could she do? The image of the blade punching into Chase’s gut replayed in her head, then the blood slapping down at the tiles, red puddles spreading over the floor.
When they neared the back corner of the room, the cowboy reached out a leg. Kicked at a squat wooden end table. A rustic, heavy-looking thing. The piece of furniture slid out of the way, inching over the floor with each kick, and she realized that it had a piece of wood attached to the bottom, painted to blend with the floor.
A hole in the concrete took shape as the table moved aside. It was slightly bigger around than a manhole on a city street.
Jagged cement formed the outer ring where the basement floor had been chiseled away, and the light reached down far enough to make some of the sandy dirt of the walls visible before the shaft running into the floor sheared off to blackness.
Cora froze. Stared. Blinked a few times, half expecting the hole to vanish, reveal itself as some figment of her imagination, replaced with that smooth gray-paint finish of the floor made whole again.
It didn’t disappear.
Her eyes edged deeper into the vacancy. Tried to pierce that emptiness. She couldn’t see the bottom, only a black hole that trailed down into impossible darkness. A fucking chasm hiding in the bottom of some suburban home.
The image made her skin crawl, but she couldn’t look away.
She wanted to run. Fight. Scream. Kick.
But she only stared down into the wound in the concrete, into the void beyond.
And then the cowboy took a step toward her. Rough hands caught her high on the back, barely wider than her shoulder blades, and gave her a good hard shove. It tipped her top half toward that shadowy breach in the floor.
And she fell into nothing.
Chapter 18
The plunge into darkness ended abruptly. Cora slammed down to what felt like packed sand, motes of bright light exploding in her field of vision. Instinct had managed to blunt the impact with her outstretched arms, partially breaking her fall with her hands and then elbows, something she realized only after she’d landed.
Her torso, on the other hand, smacked down hard. Pain flared in the center of her abdomen, and she felt her breath ripped from her chest. That imploded feeling seemed to suck her ribcage inward, freezing her lungs into two tightened balls. Immobile.
She blinked in the darkness. Lips spluttering. Eyes bulging.
She tried to draw breath and couldn’t. Patted her hands around the floor of this pit, found the sand compacted and gritty and solid as stone.
When her wind came back, her chest hitched and a big breath lurched into her. She smelled the dirt then. Earthy and dry. It overwhelmed this space, filled her nostrils.
She glanced up at the circle of light beaming down from the hole i
n the basement floor. Tried to estimate how far she’d fallen. Ten feet at least, maybe more like fifteen. Jesus. She was lucky nothing was broken. She flexed her fingers and wrists then, just to make sure. Everything moved as it should, sore but whole.
Still, she watched the glowing jagged breach above, that mouth that opened into the basement. No sign of the cowboy. She didn’t know if that was good or bad. Didn’t know what was happening here.
It was almost like she remembered to panic then.
A surging tide of terror flooded her skull. Delivered an urge to scrabble away from the basement opening, whether it made sense or not.
She propped herself up on her elbows, then pushed onto her hands and knees. A sharp ache radiated from her sternum with each movement, tendrils of pain spiking outward from that epicenter.
When the lights began to click on around her, she stopped moving and blinked again. Stared down the manmade shaft etched into the dirt, watched the lights flicker on one after another. The passage just kept stretching out, elongating, each bulb illuminating deeper and deeper until it reached beyond her view.
It wasn’t a pit. It was a tunnel.
What the fuck?
Who digs a tunnel under a house?
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer to that question.
Metallic sounds drew her eyes back toward that concrete mouth above. A ladder now protruded through the hole in the basement floor, and the cowboy climbed down it in a hurry, boots pinging against the aluminum rungs.
Her legs pushed off the dirt floor then. Found traction. Launched her into a wobbly run.
Her gaze probed deeper into that manmade cave before her. It was the only place to run, the only place to hide, the only place to go.
The section directly beneath the basement had been about fifteen feet high, but the circular tunnel tapered down to perhaps eight feet as it trailed away from the house. The hand-dug cave was vaguely circular, and she had the sense of moving slightly downhill as she ran.
She leaned into it. Pushed herself harder. Made it perhaps twenty feet down the passage before her toe caught on a rough spot.
She crashed back to the ground face first. Chin bashing and scraping on the sandy surface.
Pain flared inside her head. The coppery taste of blood rushed to fill her mouth. She’d bit her tongue.
And then he was on her. Callused hands grabbing her and snatching her by the hair again. She could smell his body now, something like leather mixed with a sharper sweaty odor.
This time his hand gathered a fistful of hair at the crown of her head and yanked straight up.
She scrabbled to her feet. Hot tears stinging her eyes. Beading along her lower lashes and blurring her vision.
He pulled her a few paces deeper into the tunnel, veered right into a broader chamber there.
She didn’t see the cage until she was being shoved toward the open gate on the front of it. It was a dog pen, she thought. Small. Its spindly steel frame barely thicker than wire.
Her hands shot out. Grabbed the sides of the opening. Fought to keep herself out of it.
He clubbed her in the side of the head, a quick jab right over her ear. She saw stars for a brief moment, but that was enough.
Her grip faltered. She shot head first into the dog crate, face pressing into the steel grid at the back, and her limbs sort of folding up under her like an accordion.
From there, she sank down. Found a fleece blanket laid out on the bottom of the cage and more blankets bundled in the corner.
The cowboy latched the crate, and then snapped a thick padlock on the hasp. His tongue darted out to wet his lips.
“There you go, little lady,” he said. “You’ll find blankets. A pilla in the corner. Free room and board, you could say. All the amenities.”
He patted the top of the cage a few times as he stood.
“Do you grock what’s happening here yet? Do you want me to explain it?”
She struggled to untangle herself. Barely had enough room to get turned around in a crouch.
“See, we didn’t have too much interest in your boyfriend. Whole thing was a ruse, right? To get you here.”
She blinked hard, and the warm tears streamed down her cheeks at last.
“See, uh, Chase, I don’t figure he knew what he had. Didn’t fully appreciate you. Me? I’d never take you for granted. Can’t wait to spend more time together. But for now I have a, uh, prior engagement, you could say.”
He took a few steps toward the ladder just barely visible in the distance, gauzy clouds of dust billowing up next to his boots, shadows swirling everywhere around him. Then he stopped and turned back.
“You know what? You can go ahead and wait here. Just, you know, make yourself at home.”
That brought a snicker out of him. He climbed the ladder and pulled it up after himself, the aluminum grating against the chiseled concrete along the edge of the hole and then disappearing into that circle of brighter light.
She stared at that hole. Let her fingers lace around the slender bars of her cage.
The lights snapped out. The darkness encroached. Thickened around her like soup. Only the faint glow of the tunnel mouth offered any illumination. A weak beam spilling downward from the jagged opening, not even strong enough to reach all the way to the floor.
The end table slid back over the hole. Scuffing over the concrete. Cinching closed that circle of light like a solar eclipse until it was snuffed out.
The quiet intensified as soon as the darkness became total. It rang hollow in her ears, brought with it a memory of her wind getting knocked out, that imploding, empty feeling seeming to happen in her ear drums now instead of her chest.
She listened. Thought she might be able to detect his footsteps trailing away or a closing door. Something. Anything.
But the concrete foundation must have been too thick for anything like that. She heard nothing. The big nothing. That screaming silence sucking in her ears.
She breathed at least, inhaled two lungfuls of the dark. And then she heard and felt her breath come pluming out of her. It provided some small relief. The sound of her own breath proved to some panicked part of her that the world was still out there in the dark, that reality persisted, that she persisted, in the face of the gloom.
The smell grew stronger in the dark, the dusty, earthen tang of the exposed dirt walls on all sides of her cage. She could feel its arid touch in her throat. So dry. Stale.
She stared in the direction where the tunnel lay as though something might appear there. A beacon of light in the distance. Anything.
The black nothing gaped back at her.
Chapter 19
The next morning, Darger and Loshak met in the lobby of the hotel for a quick breakfast before the long drive into the Pennsylvania boonies. The continental breakfast bar didn’t seem too awful, though Darger thought the chafing dish of scrambled eggs looked a little dicey.
She poured two cups of coffee from the dispenser while she waited for a bagel to toast. Loshak selected a single serving cup of orange juice from a bucket filled with ice and held it up.
“OJ?” he asked.
“Sure,” Darger said.
Back at their small table, Loshak smeared butter and strawberry jam on a croissant.
“So there’s been a small change of plans,” Loshak said.
“Oh yeah?” Darger asked.
“Detective Ambrose called me right before we came down to breakfast,” he said. “He thinks they managed to track down a family member for Stephen Mayhew. An aunt. He wants to be there when she comes in to do the body identification so he can interview her. See if she recognizes any of the other victims.”
Darger shrugged and swallowed a mouthful of bagel.
“Maybe that’s a good thing.”
“What?”
“Just the two of us going in. We don’t know how jumpy these Children of the Golden Path people are going to be. Are they the peaceful hippie types or the gun-toting anti-gov
ernment type?” Darger sipped her coffee. “Personally I hope they’re the gun-toting type. I hate the smell of patchouli.”
Loshak chuckled.
They finished up their breakfast and went outside to the car. As they passed through the front doors of the hotel, Darger chugged down the last of her orange juice and tossed the cup into a nearby garbage can. She couldn’t help but envision the journey her cup would take after that. From the can here to a dumpster out back and then into a truck and hauled to perhaps the same landfill they’d been wading around in yesterday.
“You mind if I drive?” Loshak asked, dangling the keys to his rental from his thumb and forefinger.
“Not at all.”
Darger followed Loshak over to where he’d parked and climbed into the passenger seat.
“So Ambrose talked with Marcia Blatch this morning. Our soil expert,” Loshak said. “He wanted to know if the soil samples taken from the bodies would be consistent with the location of the Children of the Golden Path compound, especially considering Gage Medina said the place is a working farm.”
“And?”
“She said the location of the compound is known to be acid shale and sandstone. In other words, all wrong for our samples.”
“Maybe they haul it in,” Darger said. “You can buy a truckload of dirt from any landscaping supply or hardware store.”
Loshak started the car and put it in gear.
“Something to inquire about, for sure. If we can figure out a way to ask The Children about it without tipping our hand.”
“Right,” Darger agreed.
“The detective also had a chat with the Chief of Police out in South Londonderry Township this morning,” Loshak said as he steered them onto the road. “Gave him a heads-up that we’ll be poking around in his neck of the woods today.”
“Gotta watch those toes,” Darger said. “Did he have anything to say about The Children of the Golden Path?”
“He did. And Ambrose asked if they’d have any trouble from the group, and the chief said individual members have been picked up for minor things like vending without a permit and hitchhiking, but nothing major. The only time they’ve been called out to the compound itself was for a noise violation for some music festival they put together. Said they generally keep to themselves and have thus far been well behaved.”
Violet Darger | Book 7 | Dark Passage Page 9
