Night Film(156)

The match abruptly blew out. I lit another and began to walk.

When that one extinguished, I slipped on through the darkness as quickly as I could. There were a hundred matches in the box. I had to ration them. I remembered the Spider mentioning the distance between the gatehouse and the mansion was two miles. If I walked four miles an hour, within fifteen minutes I’d be halfway. I waited for my eyes to adjust, but after a time I realized the swirling black liquid I was staring into was my eyes adjusted.

My footsteps were a metronome for my breathing.

Beyond that, my hiking boots crunching down the grimy floor, there were no other sounds, just a marked pressure—of being sealed, as if this passage were cutting under a body of water.

When I couldn’t stand the dark any longer, when I actually began to feel confused as to whether or not I was actually moving, I stopped and lit another match.

The constricted corridor had shrunken around me, and was now less than four feet wide, extending identically in both directions. I realized that seeing the fragile light was infinitely more disturbing than just plunging forward in total darkness. I might as well put my head all the way under. Just don’t stop swimming. When that light burned out, I dropped the match and kept on, my right hand running along the crumbling bricks as a guide. It kept me tethered to the world, to reality, because this darkness was so total it became physical, a thick black curtain. It turned me upside down, made me wonder if I was actually submerged in black water and I’d forgotten which was the way to air and light. Gravity seemed to be frail down here.

I tripped on something bulky, instantly gripped with an irrational dread. It was a body, a severed limb. I kicked it a second time. It sounded like a bed sheet.

I fumbled to light another match.

A red piece of silk lay on the ground, covered in dust.

I picked it up. It was a woman’s dress—cranberry red, old-fashioned—with long sleeves and a black plastic belt. Nearly all of the front buttons were missing. I studied the neck and glimpsed the pale purple label of Cordova’s longtime costume designer—Larkin—seconds before the match burned out.

I unzipped my backpack, stuffed the dress inside, zipped it back up, and shuffled on. After a time, I worried that I’d accidentally turned around and was blindly rushing back to the gatehouse, but I didn’t stop. It was just disorientation, the dark bullying the mind. How flimsy was a single person’s authority, his confidence about his place in the world. Give him fifteen minutes of this, even Einstein would start to doubt the laws of the physical world, who he was, where he was, if he were alive or dead.

To my horror, I kicked something again. It scuttled noisily across the floor, something hard. It sounded like a piece of wood.

No. It was a bone. I lit another match.

It was a woman’s black leather pump with a square scuffed heel, covered in dust.

I checked my watch without thinking: 7:58.

I stood up again, holding the match out in front of me.

The view was a carbon copy of the one from before—a wizened brick corridor disappearing infinitely in both directions.

It looked like I hadn’t moved.

I continued on, trying to remain calm. Why was the dress down here? A woman had tried to escape? Very much like the boy’s blood-soaked plaid shirt in my pocket, the dress looked like the vestiges of violence. To die here, alone and cold, to never be found, never be loved again. Sam would think I’d abandoned her. I tried to wrench my mind away from these thoughts, chuck my attention onto something cheerful, but this place, so black and cold, extinguished levity within seconds.

I stepped on something.

Pebbles.

I stopped, feeling so many of them—hard and round—rolling underneath my boot. Children’s teeth? Molars, sprinkled here like crumbs?

I fumbled with another match, lighting it.

They weren’t teeth, but the red round plastic buttons of the dress.

I bent down to inspect them. A few feet away, lying along the wall, was the other black shoe. I grabbed a handful of the buttons, shoved them into Brad’s overcoat pocket, and stood up again.

It was exactly the same view—a black tunnel extending in front of me and behind me, eternal. I was on a treadmill, running in place. I was trapped in a fourth dimension, purgatory, where there was no time or progression, only inert floating.

The match, I realized, was burning my fingers.

I let go of it, lurched forward, faster now. I could feel my mind faltering as if on a tightrope, threatening to lose its balance. I lit another match and saw with relief only a few yards ahead—a break in the tunnel. In my haste to get there, the match blew out. I hurried on. When I felt the wall open up to my right, I lit another.

I was in a small circular alcove, gaping mouths of more tunnels fanning out, seemingly in all directions. I slipped past them, seeing faint words scrawled above each opening in crude white paint.

GATEHOUSE. MANSION. LAKE. STABLES. WORKSHOP. LOOKOUT. TROPHY. PINCOYA NEGRO. CEMETERY. MRS. PEABODY’S. LABORATORY. THE Z. CROSSROADS.

Pincoya Negro? Laboratory? The Z? I remembered the Spider had mentioned there existed at this central point other secret passageways, which led to other hidden parts of the estate. I lit another match, holding it up to the word painted on the wood right in front of me.

Crossroads.

It was what the Spider had called the clearing where he’d taken Ashley.

Crudely nailed planks, once blocking the passage, had been hacked away with an ax. It was what Villarde had done for the townspeople. Only bits of splintered wood and twisted nails had been left, some strewn on the ground.