Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(90)
No one was in sight when Dylan reached the edge of the clearing—no sign of Ela, White Eagle, or any of the Lost Boys. The door leading into the shed he’d inspected was open, blown by the wind against the frame, where it rattled on impact with the hasp. Walking out into the clearing under cover of night was one thing. Doing it now, with light streaming everywhere, presented an entirely different challenge.
His dad had warned him not to find a false sense of security in a gun, to never do anything with one in his possession that he wouldn’t do without one. But Dylan couldn’t help but feel emboldened by the steel of the nine-millimeter heating up against his skin. Like a flashlight cutting through the dark, its presence propelled him out into the clearing, where he clung as much as possible to the shadows that shook and trembled in cadence with the wind rustling through the trees that cast them.
He reached the shed and pressed himself against its back side, closest to the woods, safe from being seen by anyone who might be about. When no new sounds came to signal such a presence, Dylan sidestepped around the shed’s perimeter to the unlocked door. Peering inside through the crack between door and frame, he saw that the shed appeared to be unchanged from the previous night. Then the wind caught the door and widened the gap just enough to let a shaft of light pour past Dylan.
It illuminated the dark gravel floor. Only, a central square of it looked even darker.
The gravel had been shoveled aside, revealing a hatch that was now propped up to provide access to some secret underground chamber. Impossible to tell how long it had been here, though the scent of freshly dug earth suggested maybe not too long. Maybe.
Perhaps again reassured by the Smith & Wesson, Dylan slid all the way inside the shed, just before the door clanged against the hasp once more. The shaft of light had been reduced to a sliver, but it still was enough for him to see a ladder descending into the darkness, maybe going all the way down to Dante’s nine circles of hell, which he knew well from another of his classes at Brown.
Who said football players couldn’t be smart?
He’d played lacrosse in high school, too, after squandering years on youth soccer. Sports had always come easy to him, in large part because of a fearless nature on the playing field, which belied his modest size. He took after his mother in that respect, instead of his father. And it was that same nature that led Dylan to position himself in place over the ladder, grasping its top-mounted handles as he lowered his feet several rungs down. If he’d known for sure that the Lost Boys were down there, maybe he would have just closed the hatch and sealed it, trapping them, as apt payback for what they’d done to him the night before. Ela, though, could be down there too, and beyond that, Dylan reminded himself, there was a greater mission here: to get to the bottom of whatever was going on and why it had led her to use him the way she clearly had.
Dylan descended slowly and cautiously, careful to keep his boots from clacking against the wooden rungs. Whatever light he’d been using was pretty much gone at around what looked to be the halfway point. But shortly after that he glimpsed the naked spray of lantern light and thought he caught the faint smell of kerosene in the cooling air.
Just like the kerosene lantern Ela had used to light the root cellar where they’d made love and gotten zonked out of their minds on peyote.
Dylan stepped off the lower rungs of the ladder, onto a cushion of soft, moist dirt pitted with pools of standing water. The lantern-lit, winding tunnel before him didn’t look man-made so much as it seemed like an underground extension of the caves that were dug out of the hillside overlooking White Eagle’s property. It was like some kind of beehive, combined with a maze that twisted and turned this way and that.
Dylan started to reach for his dad’s pistol, then stopped. He hadn’t bothered to turn off the ringtone of the ancient-looking flip phone forming a bulge in the front pocket of his jeans, because nobody had the number he’d made himself memorize. He could take it out right now and call his father, or Caitlin, and tell them what he’d uncovered. But something pushed him on instead, gun left tucked in place until he was sure he needed it.
Drawing deeper down the labyrinthine path, he was struck by a rising odor on the air, something rotten and spoiled. Not a carrion or death smell, though, nor a scent resembling excrement of any kind. This was a different smell, foreign and yet vaguely familiar, as if the far reaches of his mind held some notion of it. The stronger and more acrid the stench grew, the less familiar it became, until Dylan began to consider the original thought an illusion.
Only he couldn’t, not totally, because he was sure it held some meaning for him, some memory he couldn’t quite grasp.
A bit farther along, the path canted upward, toward a smell of freshly dug earth that was strong enough to break the persistent oily, stale stench, at least for a moment. The path seemed to widen where it forked to the left, seeming narrower to the right. Then Dylan realized that the right path actually led to an evenly carved, door-size breach leading to a passageway forged by man and not nature.
The acrid stench seemed to peak, and Dylan saw he’d entered some kind of chamber. But it was too far from the spill of lantern light to discern anything more, until he noticed a matching pair of lanterns on either side of the dug-out entryway and turned one of them up.
A chamber all right—a storage chamber, encased by limestone walls.
He spotted what looked like tarpaulins thrown over uneven heaps and piles of something that seemed to hold the source of the stink, overpowering in the tight confines. Breathing through his mouth, Dylan peeled back the edge of one of the tarps as unobtrusively as he could, pulling—stupidly maybe—a clump of whatever was concealed beneath it free and up to his nose.