Blackbriar

by William Sleator

  “Oh, yes,” Danny said.

  They hung together just inside the trees, until Danny took a deep breath and said, “I’m going to look inside. We haven’t been gone that long, they won’t expect us back, especially without the car. We’ve got to find out how they get inside. Philippa put another lock on the door the other time this happened, so they couldn’t be using an old key. We won’t have this chance again, surprising them without the car.”

  “How can you? I can’t bear the thought of going any closer. I won’t let you, I’ll scream if you do!”

  Though his whole body felt tightened with fear, Danny almost smiled. How brave and tough she had tried to seem the first time he had met her, how foolish and weak she had made him feel! Now his fear was like nervous energy, pushing him forward instead of holding him back; and he felt a strange kind of pleasure in insisting that they do what he wanted. “But we’ve got to at least look inside!” he said. “Don’t you see? They won’t be expecting us.”

  Slowly they moved across the yard. It seemed to take forever. Danny reached the window, Lark crouched behind him. He moved his head just a fraction of an inch, so that one eye only was peering inside. And this time there was someone there, a figure crouching at the hearth, rapidly feeding log after log into the already considerable blaze. His lean, athletic body was clothed in tight-fitting black, but Danny couldn’t see who he was, for though the man continually turned his head from side to side, as if making sure he was not being watched, he didn’t turn it far enough so that the firelight made his features clear. Very soon he stood up, brushed off his hands, and picked up the lantern beside him. Then, as the man checked the room once again, Danny caught a brief glimpse of a thin face with large, soft lips, framed by a mass of curling, shoulder-length hair.

  As soon as he had looked once around the room, the young man pulled open the cellar door, stepped inside, and slammed it behind him. Danny saw the light from his lantern grow dimmer behind the large space at the bottom of the door until it disappeared altogether.

  “Come on,” he whispered, “we’re going in now.”

  “Going in?” She sounded incredulous. “But who’s there?”

  “A young chap. He’s down in the cellar now. And I’ll bet he’s just as scared as we are. If we’re quiet, he won’t hear us going in, and maybe we can surprise him down there. He has no weapon, and . . . he doesn’t look like the kind of person who would hurt us.”

  “But why do we have to go in at all?”

  “Why, to find out who he is, of course, and where he’s from and why he did this.”

  There were two locks on the door now. Danny opened them without a sound. The large flashlight was just inside, but he did not turn it on as they crept past the fireplace to the cellar door. They paused. For a second, he wondered if he would be doing this if he hadn’t noticed how gentle and unsure of himself the young intruder’s face and movements had seemed.

  And then he switched on the light, pulled open the door, and dashed down the steps. He swung the beam around the room again and again, not stopping until he felt Lark touch his shoulder.

  The cellar was empty.

  For a moment Danny wondered if he might be going mad. “But I saw him go down here, I know I did,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course. I know what I see.” He stepped down onto the stone floor and swung his flashlight around once again. There was certainly no one in the room.

  “Wait a minute,” Lark said. “Turn off the flashlight.”

  “Why?”

  “Just turn it off. I think I see something.”

  “But—”

  She reached over and flipped the switch. There were no windows in the cellar and for a moment they could see nothing.

  “What good is this going to do?” Danny said pettishly.

  “Please, just wait a minute. I think I might have seen something, and this is the only way to find out.”

  As their eyes adjusted to the darkness they could see that only a trickle of pale moonlight was coming in through the coal chute. But, oddly, there was enough light in the room to see everything, dimly but clearly.

  “You don’t think he could have gotten out through the coal chute?” Danny said. “He didn’t have time, and it’s too small anyway.”

  “No, he didn’t. But look over there,” and she pointed to the opposite corner of the room, where a rusty bedspring leaned against the wall. “I knew I saw something there.”

  Yellow light was coming from the corner, filtering through the bedspring from somewhere behind, pausing to rest on an occasional mangled metal curlicue. “But where’s it coming from?” Danny cried, and ran over. The spring seemed almost like a cage, blocking one corner, and Danny was not surprised that he had never noticed anything here before. But in a moment Lark was down on her hands and knees, and found that with not too much trouble she could squeeze her way behind it.

  “Quick!” she cried, “Danny! Come in here!” And scraping his hands on the floor, he crawled in behind her. There, its bottom about a foot from the floor, was a tiny wooden door, only four feet high and three feet wide. Light was coming in through the cracked, rotting boards, and the door hung slightly open, so that even more light came through the edge.

  “It’s so crowded back here, how do we get it open?” Danny grunted, pushing himself back against the bedspring as Lark tried to slide over to make enough room to open the door a bit more. When they had squeezed together into a space that seemed much too small for two people, Lark gave the door a strong push and it swung slowly open, creaking gently.

  Danny gasped and Lark almost cried out. They had not known what to expect; what they saw was a stone passageway. Tunnel-like at first, it quickly became high enough for a man to stand upright. The arching ceiling was also of stone, supported by thick wooden beams.

  Rubbing uncomfortably against each other, Lark and Danny slid over so that they could see deeper inside. At first it seemed as though the passage ended after about ten feet, but they quickly realized, from the way the ceiling sloped and turned at the end, that it must lead to a descending flight of steps. The light was coming from a torch stuck into a bracket in the wall at the point where the stairway began.

  “My God,” Lark whispered.

  “He must have forgotten to blow out the torch,” Danny said. He reached over and touched a hook on the inside of the door. “And to lock the door.”

  “He must have been in a real hurry.”

  “I told you he looked scared. It’s lucky for us that he was.”

  All at once Danny noticed how uncomfortable they were. “Well, we can’t just stay here, all squeezed up like this,” he said.

  “You don’t expect us to go down there, do you?”

  “Well, we’ve got to go down it sometime, and now might be the best time. That man was just here, so it’ll probably be a while before somebody uses it again. And the door’s unlocked. They might not be so forgetful next time.”

  Lark shivered. “I suppose this means there’s got to be a next time. How awful to think that people, from somewhere, are going to be coming in and out of the house, while you’re away, while you’re asleep in your beds . . .”

  “Don’t keep saying ‘you.’ You’re here too, you know, it’s too late for you to get out of it now.”

  “But do you really mean to keep living here? I suppose it’s obvious that this fellow was sent by Lord Harleigh, and after what you heard yesterday there’s no question but that they want to harm us. You’re just not safe anymore. I think we should tell the police.”

  “But I don’t really think they will harm us.” He tried to shift into a more comfortable position. “They seem to be afraid of any attention, and they’d get attention if anyone was hurt. I mean, I bet they’d rather have us here than a lot of policemen poking around. And we can’t tell the police because what do we have to tell them? That I overheard a conversation? I think all Lord Harleigh wants to do is scare us. That’s what they�
��ve been trying to do.”

  “So what do you propose to do, then?”

  “Explore this passageway, of course.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  Lark sighed angrily. “But we can’t go now. Philippa will be back any minute, and I’m sure you don’t want her to know about this.”

  “But now’s the only safe time to go, since they’ve just used it. We’ll just leave Philippa a note saying we went for a walk. This tunnel couldn’t go on that long, it must lead to someplace quite near here. When we come out we can just walk back to the house as if nothing had happened.”

  In a few moments they were ready to go. Fastened to the front door was a hastily scrawled note saying, “Dear P., We went for a walk, be back soon. Love L. and D.” Lark brought the smaller flashlight. Leaving the door unlocked, as they had found it, they crawled into the narrow passageway. When they reached the place where it grew wider they stood up, brushing off their knees, and stepped over to the stairway.

  The stone steps were steep and very narrow, and wound in such a tight spiral that they could not see beyond the sixth step. Slowly they started down, constantly switching their beams of light from the steps of the walls around them. Very soon the stairway had made a complete turn, and they could no longer see the light from the torch behind them.

  “Hey,” Danny said, “it keeps going. I thought it was only going to be a few steps.”

  “So did I.”

  As they went on the air began to grow colder and damper. Their breath was as thick as kitchen steam. Water dripped all around them, making eerie metallic noises as it struck the stone.

  They reached a landing. Only a small one, for they could see where the steps began again after a few feet. To the left was a stone archway with a room behind it. Danny sent his light through the doorway and it hit a bare stone wall about ten feet away.

  “Just a small room,” he said, and stepped in. Lark, just behind him, almost tripped over something on the floor, and cursing, pointed her flashlight at her feet.

  Her shriek echoed all around them.

  “My God!” Danny cried, spinning around, “What—?”

  With her cry still ringing, distorted, through distant stone passageways, Danny saw Lark stagger back against the wall. At her feet a human skull rolled crazily for a moment, then came to a rest, its vacant eyes gaping at him from the threshold.

  “Oh, no,” he whispered. Shivering, he felt sweat break out over his whole body. And from the center of the floor he played his shaking light over the whole room.

  The floor was covered with bones. Most of them lay rather neatly around the walls. The heads, rib cages, pelvises, legs and arms were all in their proper relation to one another, so that it was obvious that many bodies had been carefully laid out here. Over the years the flesh had rotted away, leaving only the clean white bones.

  Danny shook Lark’s shoulder very gently. Her eyes were closed. “Hey, come on,” he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “Open up, it’s not so bad. They’re all dead, they’re not going to hurt you.”

  “No,” she whispered. “I don’t want to see. I want to get out of here, I want to go home, but I can’t move.”

  “Please, don’t be like that.” He turned and quickly examined the bones once more, his hand still on her shoulder. “Don’t you know what this is? It’s terribly exciting.” Her eyes remained tightly shut. “This . . . is one of the answers. This must be what Mary Peachy did with all the bodies.”

  Her eyes blinked open, but she kept them focused on his face. “How do you know that? How do you know they’re not just . . . the other people who wandered down here?”

  “How could they be? They’re all in the same condition, they must have all been put here around the same time. And it must have been a long time ago, it takes a while for everything to rot away so completely.”

  She glanced at her feet, then for a second at the other side of the room. She shook her head quickly, then said, “I’m sorry. I was just so shocked and surprised.”

  She stepped away from the wall. Danny still had his hand on her shoulder. They were standing very close together. For the first time Danny felt truly stronger than she, responsible and protective. Somehow it was a beautiful feeling, filling his body with an unknown, intense kind of warmth. “I—” he started to say. They were looking into each other’s eyes. Suddenly she leaned forward, and they kissed.

  Quickly Danny stepped away. “Oh,” he said. “Well, are you all right now?” He felt himself blush.

  She was smiling, and, helplessly, so was he. “Yes,” she said, “I’m fine.” She held up her light, and once more they looked around the room. And why was it that the bones were no longer menacing, only lonely and sad?

  “I guess you must be right about them,” she said. “It all fits together. If only there was some way we could know for sure that these were the people on the door.”

  Danny examined some of the bones more closely. Lark, still trembling slightly, remained on the threshold. “They’ve got to be,” Danny said finally, coming back to her. “Their names on the cellar door make it just like a gravestone, and here, beyond the door, are all these people. They’ve got to be the same ones.”

  “I suppose the only way we’ll really ever know is if we find Mary Peachy.”

  “I wonder if one of these is her,” Danny said. “I guess, when she knew she was going to die, she could have just crawled down here with the others.”

  “But then she would have put her date on the door too.”

  “I know. And somehow I think her fate was different from everyone else’s. I don’t know why.” He glanced back into the room once more, then they both walked across the landing to the next flight of stairs.

  These stairs, though made of stone, were obviously newer than the others, much more squarely, neatly made. And they did not turn, but plunged down in a straight line so very far that they could not see to the end.

  “God, it makes me dizzy,” Lark said, taking a step back.

  “This is incredible! Where could it possibly go? These are so much newer than the rest. Who would go to all the trouble to build something like this? It’s insane!”

  “Think,” Lark said, “it certainly is insane . . .”

  “Lord Harleigh! Of course. Why, these steps must go all the way down, the hill, to Harleigh Manor. That’s what the librarian meant about the ‘soft underbelly’ or whatever.”

  “And that’s where the fellow who built the fire came from.”

  “Well . . . I suppose we really can’t go down there now,” said Danny quickly. “It would take us forever, and Philippa would go mad with worry.”

  “We’ve done enough today,” Lark said, sounding relieved. “Let’s save something for another time.”

  Philippa had not yet returned when they got back up to the house. So much had happened that the time had seemed longer than it actually was. The first thing they did was to move the bedspring right up against the tunnel door, so that anyone trying to come into the house that way would be unable to get through unless he could manage to knock over the spring by pushing open the door. This feat, if possible, would require great strength as well as produce a tremendous noise. “Now,” Lark said, “we’ll know for sure if anybody gets in.”

  “Plus,” Danny added, “it won’t give it away that we know about the tunnel. I mean, we could have just moved the spring against the wall to get it out of the way.”

  The old door that led down to the cellar had no lock, but the latch was on the living room side. After closing the latch, they took down the note from the front door, lit the lamps, built up the fire, and when Philippa finally did arrive, her hair an unreal, shining orb, they had just about got the coal stove going. They did not mention the tunnel.

  Danny did not sleep well that night. And when he awoke in the darkness, with the familiar laughter fading away above the pounding of his heart, he felt the old, nightmare fear more strongly than ever.


  Then he noticed that there was a light coming from Lark’s room. He got out of bed. Now she’ll know what I mean, he told himself, now she’s heard it too. What a relief to know at last where it’s coming from. As he stepped into Lark’s room he heard the reassuring sound of Philippa’s snores coming from the room beyond.

  Lark was sitting up tensely in her bed, a candle burning at the table by her side. “Oh, hullo,” she said quickly. “I can’t stop thinking about the tunnel, and I can’t sleep either because I keep thinking I hear somebody pushing over the spring.”

  “What about that laughter! Now do you see what it’s like?”

  “What laughter?”

  “Didn’t you just hear it?”

  “Oh, you mean that dream you have. No, why should I have heard it?”

  “But it’s not a dream, I always hear it after I wake up. You’ve been awake, you’re not even reading, you must have heard it!”

  “I didn’t hear a thing. Don’t get so emotional. It’s only a dream.”

  “But I tell you, I’m awake when I hear it, I could see the light from your room while it was going on.” He slumped into the chair by the bed table. “After it died away I felt so relieved, knowing that it’s just some girl down there, laughing in that passageway to frighten us. But if you didn’t hear it, I still don’t know what it is.”

  “Well, I didn’t, and I’ve been listening to all sorts of real noises, so I know I would have heard it if it was there. It’s just your imagination, and I’m not surprised, after what we saw today.”

  “But it sounds so real,” he moaned. Suddenly he was strangely upset, clenching his hands together and rocking back and forth in the chair. “It sounds so very real.”

  16

  Danny was awakened by a harsh scraping sound, then a blast of icy morning air. The steam from the hot water Philippa was pouring into his basin swirled in the gusts of raw wind blowing through the room.

  Pulling the blankets tightly about him, he struggled to a sitting position. “Uh,” he said hoarsely. “What happened? Did you open the window?”