Breathing hard, Parker glanced over at Nate. “We doing this?”
Nate clicked his tongue against his teeth.
“I’m following you, big guy.”
Parker nodded, then stepped through into the collapsing old church.
The smell of stale, old air washed over him in a dead heave, pricking his upper sinuses, tickling his brain like a sneeze that just wouldn’t come. He snorted against the sensation and spat a fat loogie onto the rough floor, then pulled the collar of his T-shirt up to cover his nose and mouth, observing the place from behind foggy glasses.
The nave of the church must have been impressive once, but now it was faded and decaying to match its outside. Blades of light from long-broken windows poured across blighted pews draped with black dust, while cobwebs collected in every corner of the hall and thistle weeds sprouted up between split floorboards. At the back of the church, above a toppled lectern, a large wooden cross hung on the wall, listing to the side as the building continued to sag and crumble with each passing year.
Even through Parker’s T-shirt, the whole place stank of mold and dry rot and bitter chalk; it reminded him of the time his parents had dragged him out to North Plainfield to clean out his grandpa’s house after the old man had finally given up the ghost. Clearing out trash up in the attic, he’d found a dead raccoon in the farthest corner, withered with age and shot through with maggots. That same smell was in here. Like something had crawled inside the church to die.
Parker walked a slow circuit of the big open hall, soaking up the details, kicking sweeps of detritus out of his way as he went. High up on the far side of the church, a falling tree had torn through the wall, leaving a scar of light in its wake. Pulped Bibles sat in splintered pew backs, only barely identifiable from the gilt crosses branded in their cracked, rotting covers. Reaching down, Parker tried to pick one up, but it crumbled to dust in his hands.
Around the back of the fallen lectern, underneath the great wooden cross, Parker turned to stand where the priest or pastor or whoever must have stood when this town was still alive, trying to picture what it must have felt like to deliver a sermon here, this deep in the woods. His parents had never really brought him around to the church way of thinking; he could never seem to make the leap of faith required. He got that from his mom. She’d always been solidly interested in the realm of the provable. So when his dad up and vanished one day, all she had to cling to was the fact that he was gone. No wonder she’d spiraled out. Sometimes he’d gotten the sense that his dad used to be, if not exactly religious, then at least spiritual. He’d never held it against the man, it was just that he thought the idea of life beyond the grave was all bullshit—until he’d woken up to a ghost smiling back at him. Now he didn’t know what to think.
He shifted in place, and underneath his feet, the old boards groaned. Glancing down, he saw something there that he hadn’t before.
Kneeling, Parker swept away the twigs and needles and dirt with his bare hands until the shape of it was clear—a long, wide rectangle cut in the floor, precisely aligned with the rest of the floorboards so that it was almost perfectly invisible, unless you were looking for it. A pair of rusty brown hinges sat at one end of the rectangle, a tarnished ring handle at the other. Parker ran his hands over all of it, getting a feel before thumping a fist in a quick one-two-three in the rectangle’s center. Yep, definitely hollow.
“There’s a door in the floor,” he called out.
At the other end of the church, Nate’s head popped up over a pile of pews, beady black eyes burning with curiosity. “There’s a what?”
“A door,” Parker said again. “Set in the floorboards back here, behind the thing. The lectern.”
“What kind of a door?”
“Like for a cellar, or something.”
Nate crossed the church, weaving in between the slumped pews, to stand over Parker. “Does it open?”
“Haven’t tried yet.”
Nate rolled his eyes and made an impatient noise in his throat. “You know, I really cannot believe your lack of curiosity sometimes.”
“I was waiting for you,” Parker protested.
“Then let’s do it,” Nate said. “I’ll let you do the honors, for obvious reasons.”
Parker looked at his friend for a moment longer, then looped a pair of fingers through the brass ring and pulled. The hinges screamed in protest, a grinding screech that bit like pins into Parker’s eardrums, but he kept pulling, lifting the long panel door back to reveal a rickety stair-ladder that led into a deep darkness below. He couldn’t see down into it; the small amount of ambient light in the church had little chance of penetrating that far. Staring into the dusty dimness, Parker pushed the door away, letting it fall with a clap against the floorboards, sending a fresh cloud of dust and dirt curling into the air around it. The impact echoed throughout the big, empty church, but the cellar was tomb-still.
“Now what do you suppose they were keeping down there?” the ghost asked.
Parker set his backpack down and produced the small Maglite from one of the side pockets, clicking it to life. The harsh white beam cut like a lightsaber through the dim light of the church, and he turned it downward, tracing the length of the ladder stair to where it met a hard soil floor. It couldn’t have been more than ten feet down, but from where the two boys perched, it seemed easily three times that.
“Let’s go find out,” Parker said.
Propping the battery end of the flashlight between his teeth, he swung himself around to ease down the steps, submerging himself in the darkness.
Hidden away in some barrow, curled up like a fist, all bones and tendons and wretchedly drawn angles, the bloody boy-thing slept. He dreamed of a voice like ice against his buzzing, blister-hot skin as the sun slid across the sky beyond the trees. It crawled out to soothe him from the tiny, impossible spaces that separated the particles in the air, caressing him with slithering, frost-rimed tendrils that coiled across his sweat-blanched flesh and sent chills through his strange new body, easing back the knives of the fever that had taken up residence throughout.
I am here with you, it whispered to him. You are not alone. I will keep you safe. I will keep you alive. Just follow me, and stay close.
The voice and the nightmares and the fever were one and the same—the last, dying scrap of the boy that he’d been knew that. But it was too late to stop it now. He was in its hands. The change almost complete. Nothing to do but sink.
Alone and in agony, Adam let go and disappeared down into the well of himself, and the warped, bony thing that emerged hours later was not him anymore.
I am here with you, Adam.
I love you, Adam.
But the thing did not recognize the name.
12
The rocks were a lot heavier than Chloe remembered them being yesterday. Straining against herself as they four-handed them back to camp, she went slow and steady, trying to avoid tearing the throbbing hole in her side open again. One at a time, she and Nicky lugged the stones from the trees to the place where they’d left Josh.
While Chloe had been out scouting for rocks, Nicky had remained by his side, both her hands curled in his, staring off into the distance. But when Chloe returned from the trees, Nicky was all business. Together, they piled the stones around Josh, wrapped as he was inside his sleeping bag, the stains from his exposed insides still bright red on the green polyester, even in the sallow morning light.
When they’d drawn a full outline around him, Chloe wiped away the lines of sweat from her flushed neck and cheeks. Leaning hard on her improvised crutch, she turned back to Nicky.
“Okay, I think we can start stacking them now,” she said. “This should be enough.”
Nicky made a pinched face.
“What?”
Nicky shook her head.
Chloe took a step closer to her. “No, seriously, what?”
“I thought about it, and…” The redheaded girl let out a choked-back moan and wipe
d at her teary eyes with dirty hands. Clearing her throat, she said, “Can I do it?”
“What do you mean?”
Nicky nodded toward Josh and the pile of rocks. “Would you just … let me handle this part of it? For him?”
Chloe studied her face for a moment, the dirt and the sorrow and the absence tattooed there, never to be banished or scrubbed clean again. She glanced down at the wounds carved through the soft, exposed skin between Nicky’s shoulder and her breast, the scabby, parallel lines left there by something they couldn’t understand or explain.
“Sure,” Chloe said. “I can sit and chill. Probably need to rest, anyway.”
“No, I mean—”
“What?”
“Can I … Can I be alone? With Josh? Just for like, a little while, so I can …”
Right. Of course. “Oh. Sure. If that’s what you need, then absolutely. I think I heard a creek down that way, anyway.” With her free hand, Chloe pointed off into the trees. “Might head down and see if I can find it. We’re running low on water, so probably isn’t a bad idea to keep us from dying of thirst.”
If we even live that long, her brain snarled at her from the depths. Two of us gone already, three if you count Adam. Leaving Nicky alone might not be such a good idea—
She cut the thought off midsentence, clapping her brain shut with a heavy clack like a bear trap.
“So, yeah,” Chloe said. “I can make myself scarce for a little while. You take your time here.” She hobbled over to the packs and unclipped both of their water bottles from the sides, carrying them in one crooked arm. “Just wondering, how long do you think you’ll need?”
Nicky shrugged. “I don’t know. I never did anything like this before.”
“Okay,” said Chloe. “I’ll shoot for an hour. I won’t be too far off, though, okay? So if you need anything, or if you finish early and you want me to come back, just give a shout. I’ll come as fast as I can, all right?”
“Okay. Thank you.”
Chloe made for the trees.
“Chloe?”
She looked back at her friend, standing over her dead boyfriend in his soft coffin on the forest floor. When Nicky spoke, she did so without looking up.
“I loved him, you know. I really, really loved him.”
Chloe nodded at her, tears burning in her own eyes. “I know you did, Nicky. He loved you too.”
For a second, Nicky looked like she was going to say something else, but then she shook her head and turned away to start lifting the stones, laying the first one down next to his head. Chloe watched for another moment, then slowly turned and headed into the trees, in the direction she’d thought she’d heard the water coming from.
The cellar was dusty and damp and pitch-black. The beam from Parker’s flashlight split the gloom like a blade through a sheet but did little to dispel it. Stepping softly down onto the dirt floor, Parker took the Maglite from his mouth and swept the light around the low, wide room to get a better look.
The cellar was pretty much what he’d been expecting—uneven soil floors, walls bracketed up with thick, old, hand-cut beams, rows and rows of nearly empty shelves. It wasn’t small, but its ceilings were low enough that Parker had to stoop to move around. There was a pile of moldering old Bibles to match the ones rotting in the pews stacked neatly on one of the shelves to his right, a few empty glass jars tilted over on the floor on his left.
From up above, Nate called out, “See anything?”
“I don’t know,” said Parker. “It’s dark as hell down here. I’ve only got the flashlight. Are there any candles or anything up there? Anything you could throw down?”
Park felt like an idiot the second the words left his mouth. Of course Nate couldn’t throw anything down to him. All he could do was stand there and talk shit; in some way, this must have been like heaven for his dead friend.
“I don’t see anything,” Nate said. “But, you know, good luck with the flashlight.”
“You’re not coming down?”
“Nah, I’m good up here, but thanks.”
Parker craned his head up toward the empty hatch and said, “You know, I really cannot believe your lack of curiosity sometimes.”
Parker heard a low, throaty chuckle fading as Nate walked away from the door in the floor, leaving him alone again. The sound of it was strange to him; it took a few moments for him to realize that Nate’s laugh had changed. It used to be an enormous, bellowing whoop, back when he was alive. That chuckle? That was something else. Never in his life had Parker heard Nate laugh like that.
On the other side of the cellar, the flashlight beam fell on a small whitewashed door set in the wall. Parker could see that he wouldn’t be able to fit through it standing normally; maybe Chloe could have, or Nicky, but if he himself wanted to get through, he’d have to crouch and twist himself into angles that he could already tell were going to be painful. Stepping in close, he traced the door’s upper edges with his hand, down to where it was held shut by a crude latch made from a heavy chain and a rusty oversized nail.
Looking around the cellar once more to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, Parker hefted the chain off the bent nail and dropped it, jumping only a little when it clacked against the door-jamb. He curled his hand around the door’s handle and pushed. It wouldn’t move. He pushed harder, feeling it give the tiniest bit, but it was stubborn. Leaning back, he scanned the edges of the door to make sure he hadn’t missed a second chain, anything like that, but there was nothing. Okay. Fine. Clenching the small flashlight between his teeth again, he braced both hands and a shoulder against the little door and, counting to three, shoved as hard as he could.
The hinges screeched, and after a second, the door started to lurch inward. Kicking his toes into the soil floor, he slowly pushed it all the way back, then dusted his hands off and plucked the flashlight from his mouth like a cigar. Leading with the Maglite beam, Parker stooped and twisted and squeezed his way through the doorway.
When he emerged on the other side, his eyes widened with awe at what he saw there.
Steps.
There was another set of steps heading farther down into the earth, old and wooden, but sturdy looking. Reaching an arm out, Parker shone the beam down the stairway, but the light was too weak; he couldn’t see the bottom from here. Twisting to look back over his shoulder, Parker cried out, “Nate? Nate!”
There was a pause, then a distant voice came back: “Whaaat?”
“Get down here. I found something!”
“Something like what?”
Parker didn’t answer, and a moment later, he heard Nate grumbling close behind him. He turned to look excitedly at his friend who, squinting, pulled a hand up to shield his eyes as he closed the distance between them.
“Sucks down here already. What now?”
“Look.”
Parker spun the beam down the little stairway again. Ducking through the white doorway, Nate stepped around him and leaned in for a closer look.
“Okay, that’s really weird,” Nate said.
“Right?”
“What do you suppose is at the bottom?”
“Don’t know yet, but I’m going to go find out,” Parker said. “You coming with?”
Nate made a show of thinking about it, then shrugged. “Fuck it,” he said. “Why not? Not like shit’s going to happen to me down there if things go all sideways. I’m—what did you call it? Oh, right—incorporeal.”
Parker gave him a strained smile. “You know, that’s almost sweet of you.”
“Sweet’s what I specialize in, bud. Come on, after you.”
“Why after me?”
“Because you’re the one who discovered it. This is your show, after all. I’m just here to see what happens when it all goes wrong again. Which, make no mistake here, it absolutely will.”
“Your confidence in me right now is absolutely staggering,” Parker said dryly.
“Now you’re stalling. Come on, your future awaits.”
>
Nate ushered him down the stairs, and Parker obeyed, ducking to avoid banging his head on the low ceiling.
“You know, I’m kind of amazed you could fit through that door,” Parker said. “Tiny space for such a big boy.”
“Man, fuck off with that. Speak for yourself.”
Parker smirked in the darkness as he padded down the stairs, following the steady beam from his flashlight.
The stairway went farther down than he would have expected, deep into the earth until the light from the church above was just a distant memory. They were so far from fresh air by now that all Parker could taste when he breathed was dust. He marched down with Nate close on his heels until the wooden stairway terminated at a hard stone floor that looked worn smooth by age and countless feet. Parker stamped the heel of his boot against it, just to make sure it was solid, then raised the light to look around.
They stood in a small sort of antechamber, with the stairs on one end and another white door fixed in the other. It was the same style as the last one, but this door was larger, the paint brighter, preserved by the remoteness and stillness of the room. There wasn’t a chain pinning this door shut, either; instead, it was held in place by a rough iron latch that, like everything else in the church, had been made by hand back in the day, probably by the town blacksmith or something.
“Where is this?” Nate said, his voice soft with wonder.
“Don’t know,” Parker said. “Deep, though. Really deep. Under the lake, maybe. Or right up next to it.”
He stepped forward and pulled back the arm of the latch, keeping his light fixed on it as he lifted it away from the lock plate and pushed the door open. It didn’t scream like the one at the top of the stairs, but actually moved quite easily, swinging back to hang open on well-oiled hinges. Nervously, Parker stepped through into the small room beyond, widening the beam of light as much as he could without popping the head off the Maglite.
He wasn’t prepared for what lay inside, though, and kept the flashlight trained on what he saw in the center of the room. Behind him, he heard Nate grumbling as he shuffled in.
The Night Will Find Us Page 16
