When Isabel opened her eyes again, she found herself in a small, dark room with stone walls. A dank, earthy smell filled her nose and almost made her sneeze. The soft glow of a battery-powered camp lantern barely fought back the shadows that cloistered the room.
"What are you doing here?"
Turning toward the man's angry voice, Isabel saw Leroy Wilkins standing against the wall near the basement door. He was tense and frightened, his eyes sunken so deeply into his head that they were dark pools.
"It's okay," Isabel said in a soft voice.
Wilkins looked around the small room. "I ain't here. I got no business bein' here."
"Do you know where you are?" Isabel asked.
Madness lingered in Wilkins's gaze. "This is the basement in my house."
Isabel waited, noting that the old prospector's eyes settled on the wall opposite him. The wall was complete now, not the broken mass of rock Valenti and Michael described. Terrell Swanson's corpse still remained on the other side.
"I ain't in the basement in my house," Wilkins said. "I'm in the hospital. They took me to the hospital. Told me I was havin' a heart attack. I remember that."
"You are in the hospital," Isabel said. "This is just a dream."
Wilkins's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "I don't know you, girl. You don't dream about people you don't know, an' I don't know you."
"They're giving you medication in the hospital," Isabel said. "Medication causes hallucinations and dreams."
Wilkins shook his head. "You ain't no hallucination or dream, girl."
Isabel felt the strain of keeping the psychic contact. Wilkins wanted her out of his head and was trying to shove her out.
"I need to know what happened down here," Isabel said.
Wilkins grew more agitated. "Ain't nothin' happened down here."
"Terrell Swanson's ghost chased you into town," Isabel said.
"Don't know what you're talking about." Wilkins turned from her and started for the door.
"You killed Swanson," Isabel accused. "You killed him and you buried him behind that wall."
Wilkins wheeled on her. Rage and madness made a harsh mask of his face. "You'd best be watchin' what you're sayin', girl." He took a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket, stuck a cigarette between his lips, and lit up. The lighter's flame burnished his hard, wrinkled leather features and danced in his crazed gaze.
"Why did you dig Swanson out of the wall?" Isabel asked.
"Don't know what you're talkin' about," Wilkins said sullenly. He put the lighter away, inhaled on the cigarette, and made the coal glow orange, then exhaled a cloud of smoke into the basement that hung in the still air.
"Something happened," Isabel said. "What made things change? Swanson had been walled up for almost thirty years."
Wilkins turned to the basement door. "I 'spect the next person you're going to be talkin' to is my attorney."
Isabel stood helplessly watching, not knowing what to do as Wilkins's hand closed on the doorknob. Then a thunderous, sonorous boom echoed throughout the basement.
Wilkins cursed and yanked on the doorknob, but the door wouldn't open. The thunderclaps continued in regular syncopation. Wilkins continued fighting the door and cursing loudly.
Isabel gazed around the room, trying to find the source of the sound and couldn't.
Giving up on the door, Wilkins turned around, the cigarette tumbling from his lips as he stared in wide-eyed fear. He gazed around the basement and pressed his back against the door. "Can't get out. Can't get out this time. Just like the last time."
"What is that noise?" Isabel asked.
Wilkins glared at her, but the effort came off weak because there was so much fear in his eyes. "Don't you know what that is?"
The rhythmic booms continued, and now Isabel could tell there was a before and after sound, like a double-pump blast. She could hear the constriction, the boom, and the letting go.
"It's a heartbeat," she whispered, and the realization left. her dry-mouthed with anxiety even though she knew she was only dreamwalking and the events weren't actually going on.
"It's a heartbeat," Wilkins agreed. "It's Swanson's heartbeat."
The pulse beat more loudly. Isabel would have sworn the walls pushed in and out with the sound of it.
"He's alive, you see." Wilkins sounded stunned. He stared at the opposite basement wall. "Walled up almost thirty years over there, and somehow he's alive."
Isabel remembered Valenti's story about the skeleton lying in torn and tattered clothing on the basement floor.
"But he can't be alive." Wilkins shot Isabel a desperate look. "I caved his head in. Took a short-hafted hammer an' done the job myself. The strike was rich, you see. A uranium strike. An' it was bigger than anythin' we'd ever found. I knew it could make a man rich, but I knew it could only make one man rich. I wanted that man to be me." He shifted his gaze back to the wall. "So I killed him, an' he didn't die. Thirty years, he's been waitin' to get back at me."
Isabel wanted to speak but was afraid to interrupt
Wilkins's dream sequence. The answers were here; she just had to wait for them.
"Swanson's heartbeats got louder," Wilkins said, walking as if in a daze across the basement. "I heard 'em for days. Just listened to 'em. Couldn't turn the TV or radio up loud enough to get rid of them. Couldn't get drunk enough to forget them. They just stayed right there, an' wasn't nobody could hear them but me."
"I hear them," Isabel stated quietly.
"Swanson ain't comin' after you, girl," Wilkins said. "It's me he wants. He wants to drag me into that grave with him. But I ain't gonna let him." His face turned hard, but the fear remained intact. "I'm gonna take him outta that wall, show him I ain't afraid of him. Then I'm gonna bust him up into kindlin'."
Isabel stared at the wall. Despite the fact that she knew this was only Wilkins's memory, anxiety still tingled within her. She couldn't be hurt here, but that knowledge didn't seem as convincing as she'd hoped.
Wilkins took up a pickax from the basement floor and attacked the wall with a vengeance. Concrete chips spun free of the wall and shot in all directions.
Pain fired through Isabel as one of the chips slammed into her left cheek. When she touched her face, her fingers came away wet with blood. Nothing like that had ever happened. Suddenly the journey back to Michael's house seemed like an impossible distance. She turned and walked to the door. Her hand slid around the doorknob, and she twisted. The knob turned, but the lock didn't disengage.
She was trapped.
Max sat by Michael's couch and watched Isabel sleeping. His stomach knotted into a ball.
"Hey."
Looking up, Max saw Liz standing beside him. She'd come over to him and he hadn't even noticed.
"She'll be fine," Liz said. "Isabel knows what she's doing."
Max looked at Liz. "Do you really think so?"
Hesitation showed on Liz's face. "I don't know what to think anymore. All of this, Max"… she took a deep breath and let it out… "all of this is so far over our heads, I don't even know when the last time was that I felt like we could deal."
Glancing around the room, Max saw Michael and Maria talking quietly in the kitchen, picking pepperoni slices from the leftover pizza. Valenti stood by the door, like he was just about to go out and do something, but his attention was riveted on the television. News stories of people who had seen ghosts in Roswell continued to interrupt television programming. Kyle sat nearby on the floor, his injured arm elevated as he dozed.
"I know," Max said. "It's always been kind of complicated." He shook his head. "I had no right bringing you into this."