by Kay Hooper
With Angelo at her heels, Madison walked down through the gardens in the general direction of the stables, but turned off that path and made her way to the English Garden.
“They wouldn’t let us in the first barn anyway,” she told her little dog. “Becca says it’ll be closed to guests all day. Maybe even longer. So you won’t have to pretend you’re not afraid of the horses.”
Angelo looked up at her intently as they walked, his ears alert and tail waving. But he looked less happy just a minute or two later, when Madison chose the path that would lead to the little gazebo in the distance.
He whined uneasily.
“Angelo, you’re beginning to get on my nerves,” she told him. “Becca said to meet her in the gazebo, so that’s where we’re going. I told you that.”
The little dog hesitated, actually pausing for a moment as his mistress continued on, then hurried to catch up with her, ears and tail lowered now.
“I like Becca,” she informed him, compelled to defend her preferences. “She’s fun. And she knows all about this place. Besides, you know as well as I do that we could get into real trouble if we didn’t have Becca to warn us about the bad stuff.”
Angelo stuck close, silent but still obviously anxious.
Madison turned her attention ahead of them, and quickened her step when she saw Becca waiting for them in the center of the white-painted gazebo.
“Hey,” she called.
Becca waited until Madison and Angelo joined her before responding. “Hey yourself. Did you have breakfast?”
“Sure. Pancakes. They were good.”
Becca nodded slowly. She seemed to hesitate, then said, “They’ve found the door.”
“You said they would.”
“Yeah. The thing is . . . I maybe took Diana down there too soon.”
When they reached the bottom of the vertical shaft, they discovered that there was indeed a rough tunnel, angling slightly downward for several yards before leveling off and running more or less straight and level toward the west. There was just barely enough headroom for Quentin, the tallest of the three, to stand upright, but the tunnel was narrow, and they had to go single file. Their flashlights lit the space quite well, but threw odd flickers and shadows as they picked up the irregular surfaces of the passageway.
The stone floor underfoot was slippery in some places and virtually dry in others, so that they had to be careful walking. The air was damp and just chilly enough to be uncomfortable. It also held a disquieting scent of old earth and stale water, and the mustiness of a place too long closed up and left dark.
“But the air is reasonably fresh, especially for this far down,” Quentin commented, keeping his voice low since the hard surfaces of the passageway, they had quickly discovered, threw sounds back at them.
“Which means that, somewhere, there’s another opening to the surface,” Nate said.
“Bound to be,” Quentin agreed. His fingers tightened around Diana’s. He had taken her hand as soon as she’d reached the bottom of the ladder, and though he hadn’t said anything, he was worried about how cold it was.
He was worried about her.
“I’m fine,” she murmured just then.
She was a half step behind him, but he was able to see her face when he looked quickly back over his shoulder. In the backwash of illumination from the flashlights, her face seemed almost ghostly pale.
And he sensed more than saw that inward-turned attention, the quiet waiting for whatever would come. Consciously or not, she was tuning in to her abilities. Probably, he thought, how she had picked up on his concern for her.
Probably.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she repeated, then added, “Listen.”
It took another moment, but then he heard it, the dripping and faint gurgle and splash of water ahead.
“I think it widens—” Nate began, then broke off as the passageway did indeed widen very abruptly. In fact, it opened into a cavern of some kind.
There was immediately a feeling of vast space all around them, and when Nate swept his flashlight in an arc, they were able to see that they stood at the mouth of a cavern that had to be sixty or eighty feet across and a good twenty feet high. They could see the narrow mouths of what appeared to be at least three other passageways leading off from this central chamber.
They could also see the water they’d only heard before, a stream running fairly rapidly in a narrow channel that appeared off to their right, wound among and around several rock formations in the cavern, then vanished somewhere on the other side.
The cavern had the look of something utterly natural rather than man-made, perhaps formed eons ago when the narrow stream had been a powerful underground river.
Nate was the first to speak, asking Quentin, “How far do you think we’ve come from the barn?”
“Fifty yards, more or less.”
“Just into the mountains. Jesus, I knew Kentucky had Mammoth Cave National Park, with a shitload of natural caverns and underground passageways, but I had no idea we could have something like this in Leisure.”
“You really did pay attention to that teacher,” Quentin said absently, shining his own light in a slower probe around the vast cavern.
“I guess I did. But, Quentin, if this is natural rather than a mine, why keep it quiet? Tourists pay to visit places like this one.”
“Maybe not if the only access is made up of vertical shafts like the one we came down. It’s one thing to invite tourists to walk into a nice big cave, but quite another to ask them to use twenty feet of ladder and walk half the length of a football field in a very narrow tunnel to get to that nice big cave. None of us is claustrophobic; I’m betting the passageway we just walked would give most people fits of panic.”
“It’s a point,” Nate admitted. “Still, you’d think at least the locals would know about this, and I’ll swear I never heard a word about it.”
“They didn’t want you to hear,” Diana murmured.
Both the men looked at her, with Quentin aiming his flashlight carefully to illuminate her face at least somewhat without blinding her. In the eerie, indirect wash of light, her face was shadowed, the planes and angles of it distinct and yet curiously unfamiliar.
For just an instant, Quentin thought he was looking at someone else.
“Diana?”
“They had to keep it quiet,” she said, her voice low, almost dreamy, and distinctly different from her normal tones. “They’d already built The Lodge, put so much money and time into it. They couldn’t let it all be for nothing. When the first murders happened, when they realized what lived here, what fed here, they had to . . . protect their investment. And in those days, men took the law into their own hands.”
“What did they do?” Quentin asked quietly.
“They hunted him down. And when they caught him, they put him here. Shut him underground. Left him to die here. Alone.”
“Him?” Nate’s voice was so wary it was just a bit unsteady. “Diana, who’re you talking about?”
Her head tilted slightly, as though she were listening to a soft, distant voice. “He was evil. He walked like a man and talked like a man, but he was something else. Something that fed on terror. Something without a soul.”
Quentin tightened his grip on her hand, fearing that if he let go of her, he’d somehow lose her for good, because he had the apprehensive sense that some part of her was already elsewhere, tied to the here and now only by the flesh-to-flesh connection of their linked hands.
He wanted to stop this, to pull Diana back from wherever that absent part of her was, but every instinct told him not to. Not yet. This, whatever it was, was important. This was something she had to tell them. Something he had to listen to.
“It’s coming.”
He hadn’t listened to Missy.
He intended to listen to Diana.
“They thought he was an animal, so they trapped him like one,” she murmured. “They had
no idea . . . what he was really capable of. No idea how rage could give him the strength to keep going. They had no idea death wouldn’t stop him. They destroyed the flesh, but that only set the evil free.”
Quentin kept his voice low when he asked, “Who are they, Diana?”
She looked at him, seemed to see him for the first time, even though her eyes held a peculiar flat shine. “They created The Lodge. Just a handful of men, wealthy men. They didn’t intend it to be a place of secrets, but that’s what it became. After that night, after they buried a killer alive and swore they’d never tell.
“But people around here . . . some of them knew. There were stories. There always are. A whisper here, a question there. Then years passed, decades, and it was just legends. Superstitions. And most everybody forgot what had roamed these mountains—and been buried alive inside them.”
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 abo
ut 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 know 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.”
