Last Grave (9781101593172) (17 page)

“Did you ever notice if there were earthquakes that occurred shortly after you had the dreams?”

“To be honest, I don't know. I kind of tried to adopt Mom's philosophy, not think about it once I talked about it.”

Samantha had a suspicion that Winona hadn't been telling George Wakefield about her own earthquake dreams but instead had been telling him her daughter's. If that was true, then why had she not shared the details of the later dreams with him? Was it because the symbolism meant something very specific to her, something that connected with the research she had been doing about the legend her father had told her as a child?

Samantha thought about trying to take a look at Robin's memories of the dream, but she was hesitant to mess around with the girl's mind given what she had just gone through. It could be traumatic for both of them.

A truck pulled up outside, and a minute later, an older woman came inside. She had a pleasant face with a few similarities to Robin. She was carrying an oversized purse and was wearing a look of dismay.

Robin went to hug her. “I was worried about you,” she said.

“I was worried about me too,” the older woman admitted.

“Auntie, this is Detective Samantha Ryan. I called her when you didn't come home.”

“And you rushed over. That was nice of you,” the older woman said, studying her from behind her glasses.

“I was happy to do it. I just got here a couple of minutes ago. We were getting ready to go out and look for you.”

“I've had the most unbelievable night,” the older woman said. “The car broke down on the highway, and there was no cell service. It took forever to flag someone down, and then I had to wait hours for the tow truck.”

“I'm sorry you've had such a rough time of it,” Samantha said. She was willing to lay odds that there had been some magic at work there. Clearly Giselle or one of the other witches had wanted to get Robin alone for a while. But why? Was it just to try to have her kill Samantha? Or would that have been the icing on the cake?

The lady waved her hands. “I'm sorry to worry anybody. Now look, it's morning already and I haven't been to bed yet.”

“Do you want me to cook you some breakfast?” Robin asked.

“No, child, I think I'm just going to go to bed. Detective, it was nice meeting you.”

Samantha shook her hand and took the opportunity to check to see if the woman's memories of the night had been altered. They hadn't, she was relieved to discover.

“Well, Robin, walk me out?” Samantha asked.

“Sure.”

They walked outside, past the car the tow truck had dropped. Fortunately, he hadn't blocked in Samantha. She turned and looked at Robin. “Be careful. Now that you've seen a protection circle, be sure to form one of your own if you suspect anyone is near.”

“I will.”

Samantha reached out and touched her shoulder. “It's not your fault. I just want you to be safe.”

Robin nodded.

Samantha again fought the urge to take a peek at her memories. At this point, she was likely to see the image of Robin stabbing her before she could stop herself. Traumatic memories jumped to the surface oftentimes, especially with the very young. She was sure she didn't want to see the images of herself being stabbed. Also, she didn't want to risk damaging Robin's mind by being the second person to mess with it in such a short time.

“I have to get some sleep and do some work, but I'm going to be out again later today to check on you.”

“I'm sorry you have to keep driving all this way.”

“It's okay. I don't mind,” Samantha lied. “I just want you to be safe, and I want to catch whoever is behind all this. If you remember anything else about the mountains or your earthquake dreams, give me a call.”

Robin nodded.

Samantha stared at the girl in her rearview mirror as she left a minute later. She couldn't help but feel that Robin was alone even though her aunt was there. It was too easy to isolate the girl, use her. For now, though, Samantha didn't know what else she could do for her.

She cranked the music loud once she hit the highway. The last thing she wanted at the moment was to be alone with her own thoughts or risk falling asleep at the wheel. There was too much at stake. She couldn't lose it now.

When she finally made it home, she was relieved to see that Jill had already left for the morning. She called Lance, trying to forestall him showing up.

“What's up?” he asked.

“I just got home. Robin Lightfoot called because she thought an intruder was snooping around her house. I ended up going down there for a while. Still no luck on turning up anything from her mom's papers.”

“Was there an intruder?”

“Hard to say. I lectured her about calling nine-one-one next time.”

“Good.”

“I'm going to crash. I'll call you when I wake up in a few hours.”

“Okay. I got a couple more leads. You want me to run them down?”

“Yes, please,” she answered, knowing that he likely had nothing that would be of interest to her.

She hung up with him and went back down to her car. She retrieved the bag of bloody towels and her shirt and headed to the basement of the building, where she knew there was an ancient furnace that supplied all the apartments with heat. Five minutes later, her bag and its contents were nothing but ash.

She made it back upstairs and into the bathroom, where she stripped out of her clothes and got into the shower. She cranked up the hot water as high as it would go and let it pummel her body. She closed her eyes as she let the water run all over her head and face.

So much blood and gore needed to be washed off. She wished it was just as easy to wash off the stains and blood that tainted her mind as it was the external ones. She stayed in the shower long after the water had turned cold, scrubbing her skin and hair as well as she could.

When she finally stepped out, she dumped her pants in the sink to soak out the blood, put the T-shirt in the washer, and headed for her bedroom. Dressed in pajamas, she sat down on her bed and stared at the clock. She was exhausted, but her mind was racing and she didn't know if she'd be able to get to sleep.

“Sleep,” she said, in her deepest, most persuasive voice. Then she sighed because, as usual, she couldn't influence herself that way.

“Because that would be too easy,” she said with a sigh.

She pulled the book out from underneath her mattress and started to read from where she had left off. Within three minutes, her eyes were crossing and her muscles spasming. She still knew that if she tried to lie down, though, sleep wouldn't come.

She put her hands together and conjured Freaky. Petting the kitten always helped to relax her. She was relieved to see that he was clean, without a sign of her blood on him. She didn't want to imagine what giving an energy kitten a bath would have looked like.

The small kitten snuggled onto her lap, stretched, and promptly fell asleep.

“Traitor,” she whispered, as she stroked his head. “You're supposed to keep me company because I can't sleep.”

He either didn't hear or didn't care. A minute later, he was snoring. She rolled her eyes and picked the book back up.

Somewhere in here is a clue I need to help all of this make sense,
she thought.
I just have to find it.

She just wished she weren't too tired to read it. Once she got some sleep and woke up, she was going to be back on the clock dealing with Lance and Robin and whatever else the day decided to dump on her.

“There's got to be an easier way to do this,” she groaned.

And then she thought of the lectures given by her younger selves. Maybe there was an easier way to do it.

“Magic is simple. I'm making this too complicated.”

She put the book on the bed and passed her hand over it. “Show me what Winona Lightfoot found.”

The book cover opened and the pages began to fan her as they flipped rapidly. They stopped abruptly, and she stared at the heading at the top of the page.

Hell Hole Cave.

16

Samantha stared at the words. Hell Hole Cave. Robin had said her dreams about the earthquake had taken place at the entrance to a cave. There was a rough drawing of the cave entrance, which was very narrow. She stared at it intently. There was something familiar and frightening about it.

Why should such a thing scare me? she wondered.

Maybe it was because she was so tired and so overwrought. The suggestion of caves and mountains and earthquakes coupled with the name Hell Hole was clearly playing havoc with her imagination.

Get a grip, Samantha.

She picked up the book and stared at the page.

The Hell Hole Cave located in the Santa Cruz Mountains on Gray Whale Ranch is one of the most dangerous caves of the three hundred miles of caverns lying beneath California. The depth of this cave has never been adequately measured. Entrance to the cave is gained through a small opening in the side of the mountain. It is a tight fit, and only the slimmest and hardiest of souls should dare venture there. The cave has a successive series of narrow passageways and open caverns and several steep drops. One of the large caverns in the mountain is known as the Hall of Faces, where people leave sculptures in the clay walls. Other sections of the cave are rich in minerals such as quartz.

Perhaps the most intriguing part about the cave, though, are the historical references to it. Some Indian legends suggest that the faces depicted in the Hall of Faces are not carved by visitors, but are actually the only surviving remains of a small tribe that took refuge in the caves during a war between two larger tribes. Another legend has it that there is pirate gold buried in one of the lower chambers. Most mysterious of all is the rumor that ancient peoples trapped a demonlike monster inside this mountain and left only a series of narrow openings as a way for one person once a year on the anniversary of the entrapment to make their way down and check that the creature was still captive.

The only reason we know of this last rumor is that a Franciscan friar at Mission Santa Cruz in 1792 made a note in a record that a young male had been brought to the mission and treated for extreme injuries incurred while checking up on the condition of the beast under the mountain. Based on what the young man said, the friar was the first to refer to the cave as the cave into hell. He also noted that the young man was out of his mind with a fever, ranting, and had sustained deep puncture wounds to the abdomen. Despite their best efforts, they were unable to save him.

A week later, a large earthquake caused some rock slides in the mountains. When the friar finally went to check on the man's story, he discovered the cave exactly where the man had told him, but could not pass as far into it as the man described, possibly because of collapsing walls.

Samantha put down the book. Her pulse was racing. Drake had been studying spirits of the mountain, Winona had discovered this book, which reinforced a story her shaman father had told her. Trina had told her the witches were causing the earthquakes in an effort to look for something. Robin had been having recurring nightmares about an earthquake happening while she was standing at the entrance to a cave.

What if Giselle is attempting to free the monster buried under the mountain?

Everything was starting to make sense, fall into place. The witches wanted to know what Winona knew about the legend. The ritual she had seen the afterimage of in Cathedral Grove had involved a mountain with lines on the ground. She was guessing they were fault lines and that they were working to crack open a portion of the mountain in order to release the monster or to enable someone to get inside and get close to it.

But how would they know which area to try to widen? If the caverns truly went on for miles underground in many directions, how could they be certain that they were striking in the right place?

She was sure that this was what Giselle was trying to accomplish, but she felt like there was still a piece to the puzzle that she didn't have. What would make her think she could target the area well enough to accomplish her goals? Moving a ton of rock debris was a challenging task for any coven, but without precise directions, it would prove fairly impossible.

“What am I missing, Freaky?”

The kitten just continued to snore softly.

Samantha closed the book and put it on her end table. She turned off the light and picked up Freaky, who mewed plaintively. She lay down and put the kitten back down next to her. He snuggled into her side as she closed her eyes and prayed that sleep would come. She was going to need to be as rested as possible if she was going to stop the coven from unleashing a demon.

*  *  *

She was standing on a steep hillside, staring at the opening of a cave. There was a metal grate across the top part, leaving only a small entrance.

“Do you think we'll fit in there?”

She turned to the speaker. It was Robin, who was staring at the cave with a look of dread on her face.

“I think we have to. So, we'll do what we must,” Samantha told her.

“I'm afraid.”

“Everyone's afraid. It's okay to be afraid. It's what you do about it that's important.”

“I don't want to go in there.”

Neither did Samantha. There was something ominous about the entrance. Even the air itself felt somehow wrong here. She hunched her shoulders, trying to fend off the feelings of darkness and doom that seemed to be creeping up on her, as stealthy as shadows, as inevitable as night.

“We have to go in. We have to find out if it's really there.”

“But what if—”

The earth began to shake, and Samantha could feel herself shaking apart with it. She was standing there with the girl one moment, and the next moment she was gone. Samantha was somewhere else entirely. It was dark where she was.

Where am I? When am I?

The earth continued to move, and around her she could hear things buckling and groaning beneath the strain. And then rocks began to rain down on her head.

*  *  *

Samantha woke with a shout and sat straight up. Her bed was shaking, sliding across the floor. The book and lamp both fell off her end table and the picture of her parents flew off the wall and hit the ground, the glass shattering into a hundred pieces.

Freaky was clawing his way up her body, eyes wide in terror. She grabbed him and leaped from the bed, sliding across the floor in her socks and slamming into the door. She cursed as she tried to wrench it open and then she sat, huddled with the kitten in the doorway as the house seemed to shake itself apart around her.

I don't want to die. Not here, not like this
. The thoughts flashed through her mind. Freaky had dug all of his claws into her arms and was holding on for dear life. Apparently, he wasn't ready to die yet either.

The door to Jill's bedroom flew open, slamming into the wall with a thud so loud they both jumped. Samantha wondered how much longer it could possibly last and whether they should try to make it outside or stay right where they were.

At last the shaking came to an end. They sat there for what seemed an eternity, both waiting, both afraid to leave the doorway for fear it would start back up again. Slowly Freaky retracted his claws.

“I think that was even bigger than the first one,” Samantha told the little kitten. Freaky didn't seem to disagree. Slowly she stood up and moved back over to the bed. She dropped Freaky on the floor before she shoved her bed back in place. She picked up the book and the lamp, then headed out to the kitchen to get a broom and dustpan to take care of the broken glass.

Once that was finished, she sat back down on the bed. The dream she'd been having before the earthquake hit came back to her, rattling her more than the quake had. She realized she knew exactly who the other woman in Robin's dream was. It was her, because she had dreamed the same dream. And even she didn't know where she had disappeared to.

She forced herself to take deep, calming breaths. Freaky was burrowing under the blankets, and she reached out and petted his tail absently. Then she stood up and walked out to the family room, where she turned on the television.

There was a news update about the earthquake and she listened. “. . . another earthquake along the San Andreas fault line. Because this quake was bigger than the one from a couple of days ago, this one is now being classified as the main earthquake and the others as foreshocks.”

She was right. This one had been stronger than the first one.

“For more updates on this and the unfolding story of the murder at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, tune into the news tonight at six.”

Samantha turned off the television. She shouldn't have been surprised that the Boardwalk scene was making news. She wondered how on earth the local police down there were going to spin everything, particularly the carousel horse who had left his post.

She turned to head back to her bedroom and jumped when she saw Roxy come padding down the hall. She had forgotten that the energy puppy was still around. She really was going to have to figure out what to do about Jill and the dog.

She changed into clean clothes and then sat down at her computer. She searched online for more information about the Hell Hole Cave. She found a few pictures of it, mostly of the entrance and a few from inside the cave itself. There were several short write-ups by people who had actually been inside. She discovered that in the room of clay faces there was also a guestbook that people signed. That was a cute touch.

More information than that was sparse, though, and there was nothing about the ancient legend. She did find information on some of the other more famous caves in Santa Cruz that were home to distinct animal species and were favorite haunts of students. She read about the clean-up efforts for one of the caves. Winona's name was mentioned in relationship to it. Apparently, she had been one of the more outspoken proponents for maintaining the cave in its natural state and keeping revelers out. Finally, she found a Web site that actually gave coordinates for the cave.

There seemed to be nothing else online about the cave. She finally gave up.

She went into the kitchen, made herself a quick sandwich, and called Lance. It went straight to voice mail.

“Hi. Finally awake and trying to play catch-up. Checking in to see where you are and what I can do to help.”

She hung up and quickly ate her sandwich. She kept expecting to receive a call back and was surprised ten minutes later when he still hadn't returned the call. She finally tried calling again, but it still went to voice mail.

“Now I know why Ed always got so frustrated when I had my phone off,” she told Freaky and Roxy, who were both regarding her with enormous eyes.

“Are you two going to play nice if I leave you alone?” Samantha asked.

They just blinked at her.

She finished getting ready to go and then headed downstairs to her car. She slid behind the wheel and contemplated her next move. She didn't want to waste time waiting for Lance to call her back. She finally decided to go down and check out the Hell Hole Cave. After that, she could check in on Robin like she'd promised she would. It had only been a few hours, but the girl had to be completely traumatized from earlier.

She pulled a piece of paper with the location of the Hell Hole Cave out of her pocket and punched the information into her GPS. She needed to go see this place for herself.

*  *  *

It was two hours later that Samantha was standing in front of the entrance to the cave. It looked as it had in her dreams. It was in the side of the mountain, which was green and lush. The top half of the entrance was covered by a grate, leaving only a narrow slit at the bottom. A person would have to back into it to get inside. She thought of some of the pictures she'd seen online. Half the people shimmied through on their backs and half on their stomachs. She didn't care to go in there at all. She shuddered just thinking about it.

The air was cold and crisp, but that didn't account for the chill that seemed to be settling into her bones. There was something deeply unnatural about the place. Samantha bent down and slowly, hesitantly, moved her hand toward the rock wall just inside the cave entrance. She hesitated. It should be cool, but it was radiating enough heat that she could feel it even before she touched it. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end.

What would she see if she connected with the stone? Would it be the creature purportedly trapped inside or the effect of spells being cast by witches? She held her breath and put her hand on the stone.

It was hot, but she didn't see either of the things she expected. She saw herself, crawling into the hole, going deeper and deeper. She saw herself barely avoiding being bitten by a black widow dangling from the ceiling. She saw herself skidding down a deep incline and then losing her footing and falling headlong into the darkness.

She screamed and jerked her hand away. “This is not the future. I am not going in there,” she vowed.

But in her heart she knew that wasn't true. If all fingers pointed to this place, sooner or later she was going to have to go inside. Her mouth felt dry and her stomach queasy. She wiped her hot, sweaty palms on her pants. She backed away slowly, not wanting to take her eyes off the cave. It was almost like she feared that if she turned her back on it, something would reach out to suck her inside.

It was ridiculous, but the fear that was pumping through her system couldn't be denied. She stared hard at the metal grate that partially barred the entrance. She wondered who had put it there and why. Why not cover the complete entrance? She had read that there were several tight squeezes once inside. Maybe to prevent more explorers from getting stuck, they had positioned the grate in such a way to restrict access to only those skinny enough to get through the tight spaces inside. Maybe the grate had originally covered the entire cave entrance and determined adventure seekers had gotten rid of half of it.