Mark had brought a flashlight. He switched it on and turned the beam into the darkness.
Brick walls, green with mold, framed a narrow rectangle barely two feet wide. The floor was of beaten earth, shiny with damp. The low ceiling was supported by planks now gray and cellular, like elongated wasps' nests: the evidence of industrious termite colonies. Beyond the gap in the wall the open space was barely six feet long. It ended in a sloping wall of dirt.
"I remember this," Pat said. "Jerry found it the first year we lived here. We assumed it was just another room. What makes you think it was a tunnel?"
"I'm afraid he's right," Josef said, before Mark could answer. "It's too narrow to have been a room. Given Mr. Bates's abolitionist sentiments…"
For a moment no one spoke. The only sound was the heavy panting of the dog, so magnified and distorted by the low ceiling that it seemed to come, not from the stairs behind, but out of the darkness of the collapsed tunnel. Pat's scalp prickled. Surely more than one pair of lungs were emitting that agonized breathing. She seemed to hear gasps, low moans of effort and distress… How many weary, frightened men and women had crawled through that dark space, laboring toward freedom?
"Mark, you don't think…" Kathy began. She did not finish her sentence, but her gesture, toward the fallen earth, expressed the horrified surmise they all shared.
"No, no," Mark said reassuringly. "They would have dug the dirt out if the tunnel had collapsed while it was still in use. I think it gave way later, long after there was any reason for its existence."
"No ghosts here, then," Pat said. "You didn't find anything, did you, Mark?"
"No."
"Then let's go."
Their retreat was not dignified. If there were no ghosts in the buried tunnel, there was the memory of old cruelty and injustice. Pat recalled a friend of hers, an Army wife who had spent several years in Germany, describing a visit she had made to the former concentration camp at Dachau, now a memorial to the tortured victims. "I stalled at the gate," her friend had admitted. "I couldn't go in. I was sick at my stomach, unable to breathe." There was nothing supernatural or psychic about such impressions; they were simply a physical expression of the impact of tragedy on a sensitive mind.
All the same, she breathed more easily when they were upstairs, with the cellar door closed. Darkness was complete outside, and the rain hissed drearily against the windowpanes. After searching, Pat found a bottle of wine in the kitchen cabinet. No one volunteered to go downstairs again.
Josef drank most of the wine. He had had two drinks before dinner, and when they returned to the parlor, after eating, he went straight to the liquor cabinet. When he asked Pat to join him she shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. She could not see that he was visibly affected by what he had drunk. But she didn't like it. Her feelings must have shown on her face; Josef returned her unconsciously critical glance with a look of sullen defiance, and poured a sizable jolt of Scotch into his glass.
Mark settled down on the floor with the photograph album.
"I promised Jay we'd return this tomorrow," he said. "Mom, you better come with me."
"I have to work tomorrow," Pat protested.
"How can you think of work at a time like this? I'll call in for you, tell them you're sick."
"I can't do that!"
"Well, you can't sit up half the night and expect to work."
It had been expressed, the thought she had dreaded. Pat let her breath out in a long sigh.
"Mark, are you really going to go over there tonight?"
"We agreed," Mark said. "Nothing's going to happen, Mom. I promise."
Pat turned away with a helpless gesture, and met Josef's gaze. She knew what he was thinking as clearly as if he had spoken aloud. Mark was so sure. He had been un-nervingly accurate so far, in all his guesses and hypotheses. What source of information was he tapping? A possible answer occurred to her, and the very idea turned her cold with apprehension.
Seven
I
It was still raining at twelve thirty, when the men left the house. Without star- or moonlight, the night was as black as pitch. From Mark's bedroom window the house next door was a darker shadow in the darkness, eerily distorted by the water streaming down the windowpane.
Her forehead pressed against the glass, Pat strained her eyes.
"Your father is going to get soaked, squatting in that tree like a pigeon," she muttered.
The inane comment scarcely deserved a reply. Kathy made none. She knelt beside Pat, her face also pressed against the glass, and Pat felt the tension that held the girl rigid. She herself was ready to shriek with nerves. It must be the weather, she thought. There's no reason to be nervous. Nothing much happened last night; if Mark is right, tonight should be without incident.
The weather was certainly responsible for Jud's state of nerves, and no doubt the dog's misery was affecting her. Jud hated rain. No fool he, he knew that thunder and lightning often accompanied that atmospheric disturbance, and he was deathly afraid of thunder. He had been on Pat's heels all evening. Mark was a lot of fun, but when danger threatened, Pat was more dependable. He had accompanied them up the stairs and was now lying on the floor by the bed, his head under it. His agitated panting scratched Pat's nerves like a fingernail on a blackboard.
Something is coming.
The words flashed across her mind with the impact of a hot brand pressed against flesh. So keen was the mental anguish that Pat fell backward, landing with an ignominious thump, her legs doubled up under her. The dog was no longer panting, but whimpering-a craven, abject sound, as if Jud were so terrified he could not even express his feelings in a long howl of woe. Turning, with some difficulty, Pat saw the bed shudder as Jud forced himself under it, well-padded rump and all.
Even then she did not understand. She assumed the danger would come from the house next door, the house where her son and Kathy's father waited. She tried to get back to the window so she could see, and found her limbs so stiff she could barely move.
Then the smell reached her nostrils. The same foul, indescribable stench she had smelled twice before. And it came from behind her.
Squatting, awkward and ungainly, Pat managed to turn.
It filled the doorway. A thin, spinning column of luminescence, taller by several feet than she herself, the color of… But there was no word for that shade. It was part of the infernal aura the thing gave off, a deadly miasma compounded of parts the normal senses could not absorb. It was not heat or cold, not light or color or smell. But because the human sensory organs were limited, they had to translate it into terms they could transmit. So… her nostrils flared and her stomach heaved at the odor; her eyes winced away from the cold, pale burning; the hairs on her arms rose, as a current of… something… filled the room like smoke, acrid, choking.
The feeble remnants of reason left in her flailed helplessly, seeking escape. But she knew she could not allow herself the luxury of fainting; bad as it was to face the thing, it would be much worse to lie powerless before it. It was not after her. She knew that as surely as she knew her name, her age, the color of her hair… It wanted Kathy.
She was fond of this girl; perhaps more than fond. But the strength that came into her body did not come from love or from any hypothetical maternal instinct. It came from without. Not in a great, overwhelming flood; it was more like-the incongruous simile occurred to her-more like liquid from a leaky faucet, slow and trickling. But it was strong enough to raise her, first to her knees, then, swaying, to her feet. With something like horror she felt her knees bend and saw her foot slide forward.
As she moved, one unsteady, reeling step after another, the thing in the doorway changed, in response to her advance. It thickened and shrank in height, as if condensing; and if its former amorphous contours had been hard to contemplate, this was worse, for there was in it a dreadful suggestion of human form. In the crown of the burning column two spots formed, like the low blue flames of a dying fire.