The Hiding Place(64)

Hurst stretched out a hand and touched one, surprisingly gently. Then he dug his fingers in and pulled it from the rock. It gave, far more easily than I expected, in a small cloud of dust and rock fragments that crumbled to the ground. Hurst stared at the bone. An arm, I thought. A small arm.

“Jesus fuck!” Fletch yelled. “Have you seen this?”

We turned. He was holding up one of the yellowed rocks, except it wasn’t a rock. It was a skull. Tiny. It barely filled his hand. Not an adult’s. A child’s. Nearly all of these dismembered skeletons were children.

“I think we should go,” I said, but my voice sounded distant and weak.

“Are you joking?” Hurst said. “This place is the balls. And it’s ours.”

That was when I understood what truly deep shit we were in. You didn’t own something like this. You could never own a place like this. If anything, it owned you.

Fletch grinned and chucked the skull at Marie.

“Dickhead.” She ducked and the skull hit the ground and split neatly in two.

“Gross,” Marie moaned. She didn’t look so great. Maybe it was the sight of all the bones, maybe it was the effects of the cider kicking in, but her face had gone a pallid gray color.

Hurst was prowling around the cave now, gouging out more bones from the walls with the crowbar, whooping each time. Actually whooping.

Fletch grabbed some more skulls and started to boot them across the cavern, like he was playing football. My gut twisted in horror. But I didn’t do anything. I just stood by. Like I always did.

“Here!” Hurst yelled, brandishing the crowbar. Fletch picked up a skull, clasping it like a bowling ball with his fingers in the empty sockets. He lobbed it toward Hurst. Hurst swung the crowbar. The metal and skull connected with a crack. The skull shattered. My stomach rolled.

I looked over at Chris for some help, some backup, but he just stood, arms hanging at his sides, staring blankly. As though, now that we were here, now that he could see what he had found, the trauma had shunted him into catatonia.

My voice finally broke: “For fuck’s sake, these are the bones of dead kids.”

“So?” Fletch turned to look at me. “Not like they’re gonna complain.”

Hurst just grinned. “Lighten up, Thorney. We’re just having fun. Besides, finders keepers, right?”

He picked up the half-skull from the ground. “What’s that Shakespeare shit? ‘To be or not to be’?”

He threw the skull into the air and whacked it with the crowbar. Fragments of bone flew across the cavern.

I winced, but I was distracted. I thought I had heard something. Coming from the walls. A weird sort of sound. Not scratching, exactly. More like a skittering, chittering sound. I thought about bats. Could there be bats down here? Or rats even. They liked dark underground tunnels, didn’t they?

“Did you hear something?” I asked.

Hurst frowned. “Nope.”

“Are you sure? I thought I heard something—bats or rats?”

“Rats!” Marie’s head whipped round. “Shit!” She bolted for a far corner and loudly threw up.

“Fuck,” Fletch said. “I knew we shouldn’t have brought her.”

Hurst’s face tensed. I wasn’t sure if he was going to have a go at Fletch or shout at Marie. But then there was another noise. This time more distinct. A small cascade of stones rattling down from the steps above.

We all spun around (aside from Marie, who was making heaving, groaning noises in the corner). The cavern hung heavy with the smell of vomit and sweat. Still, it seemed to me that the air felt cooler. Cold even. But not normal cold. Weird cold. Creeping cold, I suddenly thought. Like the shifting shadows. Not static. Moving, alive.

We swung our flashlights back in the direction of the noise. Toward the steps. They rose unevenly up into darkness.

“Hey!” Hurst called. “Anybody up there?”

Silence, and then another small fall of stones.

“You’d better get down here or I will come up and…”

His voice tapered off. A shadow reared up on the wall. Tall and spindly, clutching something in its elongated fingers, something that looked like a baby…

We all fell quiet, even Marie’s moans subsiding. I could hear the other sound again. The skittering, chittering sound. Closer. The shadow rounded the corner. My scalp tightened. Hurst raised the crowbar. Slowly, the shadow shrank and melted into a solid figure. A small figure in a gray hoodie, pink pajama bottoms and trainers. In one hand, she held a flashlight. In the other, a plastic doll.

“For fuck’s sake.” Hurst lowered the crowbar.

“You are shitting me,” Fletch muttered.

I stared at Annie. “What the hell are you doing here?”





27





We sit, the pair of us, in the back room. It is dimly lit, furnished only with two sturdy leather armchairs, a desk and a reading table. A faded but probably once expensive rug covers the bare floorboards. Tall bookshelves take up most of the wall space, jam-packed with books whose spines are all pleasantly cracked and worn.

Never trust a person whose bookshelves are lined with pristine books, or worse, someone who places the books with their covers facing outward. That person is not a reader. That person is a shower. Look at me and my great literary taste. Look at these acclaimed tomes that I have, most probably, never read. A reader cracks the spine, thumbs the pages, absorbs every word and nuance. You might not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can definitely judge the person who owns the book.