by Кей Хупер
Abruptly, she stepped out into the cavern, moving with the certainty of someone who knew where they were going.
"What the hell?" Nate muttered.
"Let's find out," Quentin told him, holding on to Diana's hand and shining his flashlight to illuminate her way.
Still muttering, Nate said, "I don't mind telling you the hair on the back of my neck is standing straight up." He had his free hand on his weapon.
Quentin knew how he felt. There was something almost unbearably creepy about being in this dark, dank underground place and listening to Diana's soft, serene voice speaking of a horrible past event that had the power to send chills up the spine. It wasn't so much what she said as how she said it, her voice almost sweet almost... childlike.
Quentin felt a stronger chill when he realized that, when he suddenly understood that it wasn't Diana they had been listening to.
When the voice coming out of her struck a chord of familiarity so deep inside him it was like a splinter of ice in his heart.
Before he could react to that, before he could even try to somehow break the trance she was in, she led them into one of the passageways on the other side of the cavern. But this passageway was short, only a few feet, opening into another, smaller cavern.
Even before their flashlights showed them what was there, Quentin could smell it. The old, old stench of decay, of blood spilled and flesh rotted and moldering bones.
Death.
"Jesus Christ," Nate breathed.
"This is where it brings some of them," Diana said in that sweet, childlike voice that was, now, sad and contemplative. "They die where he died."
Quentin dropped his flashlight in order to catch her as she abruptly collapsed, and when the light rolled across the stone floor and came to rest against a rock, the beam starkly illuminated a grinning human skull lying on its side at the base of a tangled mound of bones.
From their position not far from the gazebo, Madison watched worriedly as the tall blond man carried Diana from the barn and up the path toward The Lodge.
"Is she all right?"
Becca shook her head slowly. "I don't know. I thought she was ready, but... maybe not."
"Did — did it get her?"
"No. No, it needs her. Just like we need her. But it doesn't know what she is yet. We have to make her understand, so she can help us. Before it figures out what we're doing and tries to stop us. That's why Missy thought this was the best way."
"What was the best way?"
"To speak through Diana."
Madison frowned. "How could she do that?"
"Diana can see us, you know that. Open doors for us to come to this side. She can visit the gray time too. She can be the voice for one of us if we need to speak to someone on this side. But what makes her really special is that she can cross over all the way."
"You mean..."
"I mean she can walk with the dead."
"Even though she's alive?"
Becca nodded. "It's really, really dangerous for her. Especially now, when she doesn't understand what she can do. She could lose her way, get trapped in our world or in the gray time between."
"What would happen then?"
"She'd be one of us. She'd be dead too. Or as good as."
Madison shivered again, wishing she'd worn a jacket but knowing it wouldn't have mattered. "Then she shouldn't do that, Becca. She shouldn't cross over. Somebody should warn her not to even try that."
"Yeah. I expect you're right. The thing is... once she finds out about Missy, once she understands that part of it, she'll probably try anyway. And maybe she's supposed to."
"Maybe?"
"Well, I don't know for sure." Becca frowned. "Maybe that's what's needed. So she can fight it. Face it the way nobody else has ever been able to do. So it can be destroyed once and for all."
"That's where it is? On the other side? You didn't tell me it was dead, Becca."
"Part of it died. Part of it is still alive. And that's the part they can't see, the part we have to fight. We've waited a long time, until we were strong enough. And until we had the one thing we needed most. Somebody to help us fight it. Somebody strong enough to open the right door."
"Diana?"
"Diana. If she can. If he can help her."
"I've sent for a forensic anthropological team," Nate told Stephanie, sounding as tired as he felt. "God knows how long some of those bones have been down there, but we have to find out as much as we can about them."
She pushed his coffee cup across the desk to him and poured one for herself, surprised that her hands were steady. "And you have no idea how extensive the caves and tunnels might be?"
"Not a clue. When Diana collapsed, the priority was to get her out of there, so we didn't keep exploring. I did point my flashlight through a couple of other openings, and it looked like they led to longer passageways, but there's no way to know for sure without going back down there." He shook his head. "Frankly, I'd rather not."
"I don't blame you," Stephanie murmured.
With a sigh, he said, "I don't know that it's a place for cops anyway. When I called Quentin's cell a few minutes ago, he said there was an FBI unit that specialized in exploring and mapping underground passageways. Said he'd get in touch with them." Nate paused, adding wryly, "I decided not to ask him why such a unit even existed."
Stephanie thought about that, then said, "It does seem odd, doesn't it?"
"Yeah."
"Umm. How's Diana?"
"Asleep, he said. Closer to unconscious, I gather. But apparently normal after an experience like that. Normal. Jesus."
"What happened to her down there?"
"Beats the hell out of me. All I can tell you is that I had the creepy feeling somebody else was using Diana to talk to us."
"Somebody else? Who?"
"I have no idea. But it sounded an awful lot like a kid."
Stephanie picked up her coffee cup and took a quick sip. "Okay, now you're creeping me out."
"I'm not surprised." He sighed. "Quentin was shaken by it, I can tell you that. And I'm pretty sure not much shakes that guy. I think he's seen things that would give you and me nightmares for years."
They drank their coffee in silence for several minutes, both thoughtful, and then Stephanie spoke slowly.
"Part of my job is to worry about the reputation of The Lodge. But in all honesty, I think whatever is down in those caves needs to see the light of day — no matter what happens afterward."
Nate was both relieved and somewhat impressed. "You could lose your job," he pointed out. "I mean, your bosses aren't apt to be at all happy to find cops and feds crawling all through those caves, especially once they start bringing up the bones we found down there. We don't have a hope in hell of keeping this quiet then."
Stephanie grimaced. "You know, I don't much care. After what I've learned about this place in the last few days, I'm beginning to think I'd rather work somewhere else anyway."
"Don't go too far," Nate heard himself say. And felt his ears get warm when she smiled at him.
"We'll see," she said, adding briskly, "In the meantime, you might as well take advantage of my authority here while I still have it. I'll okay, in writing, the forensics team and Quentin's FBI spelunker people to do whatever they deem necessary in those caves. I'll also put in writing my permission, speaking as manager of The Lodge, for a thorough search of all historical documents and records stored here."
"Thanks." He was trying not to wonder whether his not-so-veiled interest in her was returned. "I've already got some of my people back at the station looking into whatever public historical documents we can find on The Lodge and this general area. Plus they're pulling every scrap of paper we have on all the unsolved disappearances and questionable deaths here. Copies of everything will go to Quentin as well as to me."
"You really believe all this is connected? That there's some mysterious... something... at work here?"
"Christ, I don't know what to think. We kno
w at least two murders were committed here. We've got what may be a network of passages and caves, one of which contains human skeletal remains. I don't know if Quentin was right to be obsessed all these years. I don't know if he's psychic, if Diana is."
He scowled. "For all I know, there's a bear or pack of wolves responsible for all those bones down in that cave, and the murderer of those two kids is long gone."
"Except you don't really believe that."
He met her steady gaze and sighed. "No. No, I don't really believe that. I've never been a fanciful man, but I can tell you that what I felt down there was something unnatural. Even the smell was both strange and oddly familiar, like something I've only been aware of in dreams. Nightmares. As if my conscious mind couldn't identify it, but some much deeper part of me could."
"Your instincts, maybe."
"Maybe. I had the feeling I knew what was down there, but didn't want to know — if that makes any sense."
"I don't know if any of this makes sense, but, yeah, I think I know what you mean." She sighed. "So far, everything we've found or think we've found suggests a killer of some kind operating in the past."
"Yeah."
"So is there any reason I should warn my guests? Any reason to believe there's a danger in the present?"
Nate hesitated. "Honestly, I don't know. My training and experience say no."
"But?"
"But... a lot of old crimes seem to be coming to light, and my experience also tells me that means something has changed. Maybe it's a simple matter of Quentin being here again, pushing for answers, just when Diana shows up with the ability to somehow uncover what's been hidden all these years. Maybe it's just... perfect timing."
"But?" Stephanie repeated.
Nate remembered the bone-deep cold he had felt down in the caves, and shook his head. "It's nothing I can put my finger on. Certainly nothing concrete enough to make me offer a warning to your guests, or even to suggest that you warn them."
Stephanie worried her bottom lip with her teeth, frowning a little. "And I don't want to cause a panic — or an exodus. But I think I'll increase our security on the grounds. Can't hurt."
"No," Nate agreed. "It can't hurt."
Quentin stood in the doorway to Diana's bedroom and watched her a moment, reassuring himself that she was still sleeping deeply. He had removed only her shoes and covered her with a light afghan, and she lay on her bed just as he had left her more than two hours before.
He reminded himself that it wasn't unusual, after an extreme or prolonged use of any psychic ability, for the psychic to need sleep and lots of it, and common sense told him that channeling the spirit of a little girl murdered twenty-five years before certainly qualified.
Still, it was difficult for Quentin to make himself move away from the door. He didn't want to leave her, even to step into the next room. She was certainly getting a baptism by fire when it came to her abilities, and he wanted to make it easier for her; knowing he couldn't was frustrating and curiously painful.
Finally, he returned to the living room area of her cottage, where he had set up his laptop. The Lodge being a highly service-oriented place, it provided high-speed Internet access — and an obliging staff more than willing to fetch his computer from his own suite and deliver it to him here.
Nate had also been obliging enough to grant him the authority he needed to search various databases, and for the first time Quentin was going back much farther than twenty-five years.
"They created The Lodge."
What Diana had said down in the caves gave him a starting point he'd never had before, and Quentin intended to take advantage of the information. He needed to find all the information available on the men who built The Lodge, and the murderer they may have brought to their own version of implacable justice.
For Diana as much as for himself, he had to find the truth.
He had to understand.
"So there really was a killer?" Diana set her cup on the coffee table, frowning. After a hot shower, a hot meal, and plenty of hot coffee, she was finally feeling herself again.
Or, rather, she was feeling stronger and oddly focused, which wasn't like her usual self but was certainly better.
Quentin gestured toward the legal pad he'd filled with notes, and said, "From the info Nate's people provided and what I was able to find in newspaper morgues and other historical databases available, the disappearances began in this area in the late 1880s. Maybe three or four a year, on average. Considering how rough the terrain was — and is — and the sheer difficulty of travel in those days, it wasn't perceived as anything out of the ordinary. People got lost in these mountains. Got hurt and died before anybody could find them. It happened."
Diana nodded.
"The town of Leisure was barely in existence, and didn't have a police force to speak of," Quentin continued. "They didn't think they needed one; the people who settled around here tended to be hardy and self-sufficient, and handled their problems without, usually, involving anyone else. It's a mind-set that doesn't lend itself to calling the cops, but rather picking up the family shotgun and..."
"Taking care of the problem themselves," Diana finished. "Which is what the men who built The Lodge did?"
Quentin nodded. "It's not entirely clear from what little I was able to find, but I gather that during construction a couple more people vanished — but this time bodies were found. Obviously murdered. The common belief was that robbery was the motive, especially since what we later called stranger killings and then serial killings were virtually unheard-of at the time. Then a child disappeared."
"And who would steal a child?" Diana said slowly.
"Exactly. There was enough fear and outrage that the men who were heavily invested in this land and in The Lodge decided to hire a Pinkerton detective to try to get to the bottom of things before their workers began walking off the job."
"I didn't know Pinkertons looked for killers."
"It was generally outside their area of expertise, but apparently the man assigned was what they called a good tracker. Now, the public record on all this is virtually nil, but I did find a couple of letters in the state historical databases written by people who were here when all this was going down. One of the construction workers, especially, wrote about the hunt for this killer in detail in a letter to his sister. It's pretty clear his conscience was troubled."
"Because there was no trial?" Diana guessed.
"No trial, no arrest, nothing official at all. The Pinkerton found enough evidence to trace the killer, he believed, to a shack up in the mountains." Quentin paused, frowning. "It's still there, I think, an old stone building; I saw it five years ago."
Diana didn't question him on that point. "So the Pinkerton found the killer there. And—"
"And he, along with a small group of trusted workers that included the project manager, went up there and grabbed the guy. Whose name, by the way, was Samuel Barton. They'd already decided that hanging him would draw too much attention, and the consensus was that shooting was too good for him."
"So they dropped him down that shaft?"
"Pretty much. The shaft had been discovered when excavation was going on for the stables, and the ladder put in place because somebody had the notion they might be able to use the caves for storage. But the tunnel was so long and narrow that transporting anything down there turned out to be too much trouble. It made a dandy prison cell, though."
Diana frowned. "Did they intend for him to die down there?"
"I don't know what they intended, but they must have known he would die. The men were so angry that in catching him they had pretty much beaten him to a pulp. Dropped him down the shaft and bolted that trap door shut. He must have known nobody within hearing distance was going to help him. Maybe he just followed the tunnel hoping there'd be another way out."
"But there wasn't one."
"Moot point. According to the man who wrote the letter, Barton only got as far as that big cavern we found.
The man felt guilty enough that he went down there himself a week or so later, secretly, at night. Found the body in the cavern. And left it there."
Diana drew a breath and finished the likely story. "The Pinkerton and the project manager reassured the others that the... problem... had been taken care of. The killings stopped. And The Lodge was completed."
Quentin nodded. "That's pretty much it. Except that the killings didn't really stop, except for a while. At least that's what I think. Because people kept disappearing in these mountains. Not many, a few every year. Travelers, people passing through. Transient workers. People who wouldn't be missed, for the most part. The difference was, they didn't find any more bodies."
"Until Missy?"
He nodded again.
"Quentin...you're not saying it's been the same killer all these years. Are you?"
"You said it," he reminded her. "Down in the caves."
She remembered. Scary though it was, she remembered it all. But... "Whatever Missy knows, I only know what I said. I mean, I don't understand how it could be the same killer. How a dead man could still be killing more than a hundred years after his own death. And I don't understand why, if it is somehow true, his — its — behavior changed with Missy. Anything hunting and killing that long, successfully, wouldn't change. Would it?"
"Not likely." Quentin was too good a profiler not to have thought of that, and offered a possibility. "Unless something external forced the change."
"Something like what?"
"Diana, spiritual energy has its own plane of existence. It can only exist in our world temporarily, and only then if a doorway is provided, or if the energy itself is strong enough to force its way through."
"So you're saying the spirit of this killer was strong enough to cross over, strong enough to kill?" She was dimly surprised that she didn't sound more incredulous.
"My guess is that it killed by — for want of a better term — possessing a person. Most likely someone who was vulnerable to that kind of attack. Mentally or emotionally unstable, or physically weakened in some way. The killer took them over and... used their bodies for a while. Enjoyed their terror and confusion. Maybe even forced them to kill someone else."
