Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(103)

We weren’t sneaking up on anyone, that was for damn sure.

But at the bottom, we still found ourselves alone. He turned up the lantern as high as it would go, for the ceiling was low and there were no windows; when he lifted it aloft, his knuckles grazed the damp, peeling plaster above us.

I hunkered as we looked around. I wasn’t tall enough to strike my head upon any low-hanging light fixtures, but then again, there weren’t any. It was only the air of the place, so cramped and tight—despite the fact that the room was long and virtually empty.

“It’s too tall to call a crawl space, and too wide to call a corridor. What a peculiar space . . . just like everything else here, neither one thing nor another,” Simon observed. “No windows up there. No lights. I don’t even see any candles, do you?”

A quick sweep of the place proved him correct. “I suppose they carry a light around, like us.”

He jiggled the lantern in response, and the room swayed back and forth. None of the angles felt right, and nothing felt level, even when the light was perfectly still. “Maybe. Or else they don’t need it.”

“That’s an ominous thought.”

“Which only means it’s appropriate. Now which way, do you think? I suppose back over here . . .” He held the light forth, and indeed, there appeared only one direction we might travel for more than a few yards. Besides, when he dropped the light again we could see pathways worn in the filth that covered the floor—solidly indicating that, yes, we should proceed toward the left, to the edge of the light, where there was only a blackness as flat as the sky.

He started walking, and I joined him.

I was almost relieved to be free of the lantern, for without it I could concentrate on my surroundings—rather than on the simple necessity of showing the way forward. Now I could take note of the crusty patches of brown-stained walls and oozing bubbles of mold that sagged from the ceiling above. Here and there, tree roots and rocks and clumps of dirt poked through cracks (below us, beside us, above us), and small spills of pebbles crunched under our feet.

? ? ?

Emma, we were walking through a grave.

I fancied myself a little thing—a beetle or a mouse—exploring the collapsed ground where a coffin has rotted through and the body has long since been eaten by the worms, the ants, and the wandering rats. Even the smell was not so different, though it was much wetter down there than I’d hope to think of any grave. The air was so moist, so thick, it clotted in my lungs like old cream in a cup of tea.

The quietude was gravelike, too, broken only by our own feet, feeling about on the floor—and in time, by something else: a susurrous hum that wasn’t quite a hum, and wasn’t quite a rumble. I heard it only barely, at the very edge of what my ears could detect—strain though I might to bring it into sharper relief. I thought maybe it was singing or chanting; it was alive, at any rate, and not the mechanical clanks or grinds of gears and pulleys.

On second thought, it might have been the sound of something breathing.

So this was a grave, Emma, and I looked around for ghosts. I looked for you. I listened for you, as hard as I ever listened at home when I smelled the spirit of your perfume. But you weren’t there, and neither was Nance, and nor was the minister James Coyle, who may (or may not) have spoken to us through the board we’d made out of sticks and wishes. If this unique place of worship was a monument to the middle distance, and if I’d ever touched it, I still had no idea what it looked like, what it felt like, or why it’d called me—and no other.

? ? ?

Simon paused, his head cocked to the side. He could hear it, too—I knew it, even before he asked me, “What’s that? Do you hear it?”

“Barely, but it’s getting a bit louder. We must be getting closer . . . I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.”

“Nothing’s good down here. Let’s think instead in terms of helpful or not helpful. And is it my imagination, or is the ceiling getting even lower?”

I reached up and drew my fingertips along the flat, dirty space above us. “I can’t tell. But the smell is getting worse, and the noise is getting louder. And the floor . . .” I squinted down at the tracks we more or less followed.

(There was only one way to go, so everyone went this way. We weren’t following them, or tracking them. We were only flowing in the same direction as others had before us.)

I said, “There’s something funny about these marks. Some of them aren’t footprints.”

He nodded at them, and then at me. “I thought that might be my imagination, too—but no. Some of them look like drag marks, where a person’s heels have scraped along the dirt. Ruth, do you think? Or other, previous unwilling visitors?”

“I’d rather not consider either of those possibilities. We might be wrong, anyway,” I said, but I did not specify that I didn’t think they were drag marks. They weren’t straight, and they didn’t come in pairs—but in random patterns. To me, they looked more like the paths of enormous snakes, the boas or pythons one reads about in National Geographic, when one would rather not sleep at night for fear of finding one in the washroom.

I did not want to say that out loud. I locked it down in my mind, pulled the shutters down, and refused to look at it. I refused to look down anymore, except in furtive glimpses to keep from falling over the detritus of a basement that was slowly being crushed by the weight of the church above it.