Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(111)

Behind me, something roared so loudly it drowned out everything else—and that’s when I realized I hadn’t heard the weird rumbling noise since Father Coyle started talking. But here it was again, and a thousand times louder. It wasn’t alone, either. It came with a rocking shake, an earthquake—I knew that’s what it was, even though I’d never been in one myself.

(I’d heard plenty about them from a teacher I’d had once, who’d come from San Francisco. She’d told me that the earth pops up and down, snapping like a sheet flapped across a bed. She said you could watch it, if you were standing in the right place; you could see the ground and the trees rising and falling in waves.)

I wasn’t standing in the right place. All I could see was the line of trees behind me, and a ghostly faint glow in the middle where Barrett’s truck must be. As I watched, even that glow went away. It winked, shook, and dropped away—and I thought that the headlamps went shooting up to the sky, like the cab had been pushed onto its rear end. But that would have been crazy, right?

Off to my right, just like Father Coyle had told me, there were cars coming. I heard a siren, or a thin thread of one, cutting through the roar that came from Chapelwood, loud like a mountain falling down. I saw the light, and if it wasn’t Chief Eagan, I was a dead woman.

But if I tried to go back, I was a dead woman, too. Maybe the inspector was dead, but I couldn’t think about that. Maybe Lizbeth was dead, but I couldn’t think about that, either. I’d think about it all later, maybe while lying in bed in the weeks that came after, trying to sleep, and wondering where George Ward had gone, what the inspector had seen, what had become of all the people who’d just vanished but didn’t die. I’d wonder who Nance was, and why she’d mattered to Lizbeth.

I’d wonder, and wonder, and wonder.

But right then, with the cars coming down the highway, I only wondered if the stars would ever come back.

I missed them.





Inspector Simon Wolf




OCTOBER 4, 1921


I descended the stairs by feel, for although there was a distinct white glow somewhere at (what I presumed must be) the bottom, it wasn’t enough to do my eyes much good. Did I say the glow was white? Well, to be honest I’m not so sure. It had a white quality with a yellow undertone; it was white like the sun is white, though when depicted in art it’s often shown in shades of gold. I’m talking my way around what I mean, but since I can’t pinpoint my precise meaning, this will have to do.

You’ve asked for a report, so I will give you one. And you will take what you can get.

That said, I move more smoothly in the dark than people typically expect. It’s no secret—I’ve mentioned it before—that my eyes are very weak, without the aid of lenses; and it’s somewhat less well known that I had no access to such lenses until I was an adult.

(I don’t often speak of my upbringing, but it was not the sort that allowed for recreational visits to an ophthalmologist, I assure you. It was the kind of upbringing where meals were often uncertain, and maybe I have spent the rest of my life in compensation for that early inadequacy. I’m sure some alienist or psychiatrist would have a grand old time deciding it, but I don’t care, so I’ve never asked one’s opinion.)

To sum up, I spent a very long time regarding the world without much detail and with no precision at all. To navigate a set of stairs without the aid of my eyes . . . it’s not comfortable, but it’s familiar. It’s something I can do by rote, putting my feet down one after the other, lowering myself toward that glow that did very little except provide that pale absence of color, somewhere far away.

I hoped it wasn’t too far. I suspected I would have to climb those stairs again, in order to make an eventual escape. The fewer of them, the better.

In fact, it might have been three or four flights of stairs—I hadn’t been counting them, so this is only a lazy estimate. Or not lazy, that’s the wrong word. I was hiking them, wasn’t I? There was nothing lazy about it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, that I’m having such trouble with my vocabulary, when it comes to that night. To that staircase. To that room I found at the bottom.

A room . . . well, I can’t think of another word for it, so that will have to suffice. It was much larger than any room you can imagine, though. Infinitely larger than anything that ought to have fit underneath Chapelwood, or the entirety of Alabama, for that matter.

Or rather . . . it wasn’t infinite in actual size, but it certainly conveyed a sense of the infinite. I knew, upon reaching the bottommost stair, that I was quite some distance underground—thirty or forty feet, at least—but I felt that I was somewhere else entirely.

It might have been the sky’s fault, by which I’m trying to say . . . there had been no stars that night, and none the night before, either (now that I consider it). The sky above had been nothing but a thick black curtain covering any source of light that might have reached us from space.

So when I stepped off that bottommost stair, into this chamber (“chamber” is probably a better word), and I looked up to the ceiling . . . I did not see a ceiling. I saw the black expanse of space above me, space without moon or stars. They were all someplace else. They were all gathered together behind the altar.

Wait. Let me explain the altar. Or let me explain the room first.