Whisper in the Dark (10 page)

T
HE HEAVY CELLAR
door creaked on its ancient hinges as Mr. Patel pulled it open.

I’ve always been freaked out by cellars.

With all the reading and movie watching that Roger and I do, I know some of the theories about why this is. Roger’s mom even incorporates it into some of her lectures, especially when she is talking about Providence’s own first master of horror, Edgar Allan Poe. The “motif of premature burial” is how she puts it. When you descend into a cellar or a cave, you are “presaging your own interment,” walking down into your own grave before you are dead. The worst thing Poe could think of happening to any of the characters in his stories was to be walled in or buried alive. Like that guy who is walled into his own wine cellar in “The Cask of
Amontillado” or Ligaea in her tomb. Poe was so scared of being buried alive himself that he even designed ways to put bells and speaking tubes into his own casket.

Back in Poe’s time, they didn’t embalm people, but just buried them really quick before they started to smell bad. Sometimes they did make mistakes and put people into the ground when they had just gone into a coma or something. Then they would wake up six feet underground in a coffin. That is also, according to Roger’s mom and some of the stuff we’ve read, one of the sources of the whole vampire myth. People would dig up a coffin and find the dead body in it still sort of fresh, with blood on its hands and a contorted, scary face. But that dead person didn’t look like that because he or she was a bloodsucking monster. It was just because that unlucky person had been buried alive, came to, and then tried to claw out before finally dying of hunger and thirst and suffocation.

I admit that being buried alive is grim. But premature burial is not one of my phobias. I’m just plain scared of what might be down there. It’s not only H. P. Lovecraft who thought that underground
tunnels were used by terrible creatures hungry for human flesh. Lots of our Indian legends, like the one about the Whisperer, tell about monsters using such tunnels, about caves where horrifying and evil creatures are kept locked away so they cannot harm the world.

“There’s a light switch to the right just inside the door,” I said to Mr. Patel.

My words came out as something between a croak and a whisper. I was so scared that I was trembling, and I was clutching Roger’s hand just about hard enough to break his fingers.

Mr. Patel leaned forward, his fingertips brushing the rough wood of the stairwell wall. I tensed up, sure that at any second there would be a scream and then something—a bony hand, a bloody claw—would snatch him down into the darkness. Instead there came the satisfying sound of the switch being clicked and the sudden glow of light from the single forty-watt bulb at the bottom of the stairs. It was twenty steps away, but it looked as far off as the tape across the track at the end of a hundred-yard dash. And it was so dim. A bulb that small in a cellar makes more shadows than it does light.

Mr. Patel peered down into the semi-darkness.

“We should wait for the police,” he said in a way that made his words half statement and half question.

Roger and I looked over his shoulder down to the bottom of the stairs.

“No,” I said in an urgent voice, letting go of Roger’s hand and reaching out to tug Mr. Patel’s sleeve. “We have to go down now. Do you see it?”

There on the bottom step, lying half open on its side, was Aunt Lyssa’s purse.

I
MUST HAVE
slipped under Mr. Patel’s outstretched arm, because I found myself sitting on the bottom step holding Aunt Lyssa’s purse between my knees while I searched through its contents: her wallet, her clip-on library ID badge, her credit card holder, her brush, her makeup case, her notebook with three pens attached to it by a rubber band wrapped tightly around it. Everything was there except for the one thing I was looking for.

Roger was next to me, sweeping the strong beam of the flashlight into every dark corner of the cellar, behind the furnace, up to the rafters. His light seemed as reluctant to penetrate the dark corners of the cellar as I was.

“It’s not here,” I whispered.

“What’s not there?” he whispered back.

Whispered. A dark old cellar can have that effect on you, lowering your voice to a whisper and your anxiety to the brink of a scream.

“Maddy.” Mr. Patel’s voice was not a whisper, but it was much softer and more concentrated than I had ever heard it sound before.

“What?” I answered.

“These doors,” he said, playing his torch beam over the three oak doors set into the stone walls. “They are going where?”

He walked over to the door to the right, looked back at me, and grasped the handle.

“Root cellar,” I whispered.

Mr. Patel pulled the door open and shone the flashlight inside. Nothing. It was empty as the Count of Monte Cristo’s cell after he tunneled his way out.

Mr. Patel stepped back and moved to the second door.

“And this?”

“Where they used to store the coal.” My voice was getting softer now. I wanted to turn and run away, run back up the stairs to safety, even though another voice was screaming in my head that we
had to move forward, that we had to find Aunt Lyssa before it was too late.

Mr. Patel swung back the door to the coal storage room. Aside from the fossil glitter of a few chunks of coal, the beam of his light disclosed nothing more than the dusty walls and floor.

There was only one door left. The one I’d been dreading.

“It’s locked,” I said, my whisper so small and hoarse that I must have sounded like a baby raven. “We don’t even have a key for it.”

Mr. Patel’s long fingers wrapped around the handle as his thumb pressed the latch. With a rusty click, the latch moved down. The ancient hinges creaked loudly as Mr. Patel began to pull open that final, unlocked door.

K
UPHASH
.

That is the Narragansett word to tell someone to shut the door. It was the one word that drowned out all the others echoing in my head.
Kuphash
. Shut the door. Shut it before we see what is waiting for us on the other side.

I thought I had been tense before, but now my whole body was like a violin string overtightened to the point where it is about to snap. I was sure that as soon as that door opened something would leap out at us. Mr. Patel may have thought the same thing because he held that heavy flashlight like a club, ready to strike a blow with it. Roger was attempting to position himself in front of me, trying to protect me from who knows what—while my old stubborness, despite my fear, was reasserting itself
as I tried to push him out of my way.

“Move,” I hissed.

“Wait,” Roger whispered back, still trying to play the part of a defensive wall.

“Be quiet.”

Mr. Patel’s voice was so calm, yet so urgent that Roger and I both stopped. The strong beam of Mr. Patel’s flashlight revealed a narrow, low-ceilinged, dirt-floored passageway, slanting down, carved out of the living stone. We saw no dark, cloaked figure waiting to leap out at us. But we did see marks on the floor—what appeared to be the heel marks of someone being dragged backward. Those drag marks were clearly visible until the passageway turned suddenly to the side some fifty feet ahead.

“Listen.”

Roger and I listened. We heard a faint sound, a scraping noise. And as the three of us stood there, we also heard something else from behind us and up the stairs, where we had left open the front and cellar doors. Was it the faint sound of sirens coming down the street toward Aunt Lyssa’s house?

“Maddy,” Mr. Patel said, “you must go upstairs
and tell the police we are down here. Take your friend with you.”

“You’re going down there after her, aren’t you?” I said.

“If I do not do so, it may be too late, you see,” Mr. Patel said.

“I see,” I said back in my most stubborn voice. “And I’m going with you.”

“Me too,” Roger said. I felt like either hitting him or hugging him when he said it.

Mr. Patel could see there was no way to argue with us now. “Just stay behind me,” he said, moving down the tunnel.

It was hardly necessary for him to say that. The passage was too narrow for us to get past him. Roger and I followed, moving sort of sideways so that we were next to each other, Mr. Patel’s broad back cutting off all but the faintest glimmer of light from the big flashlight that he held in front of himself. For a while the light from the cellar bulb cast a faint gleam down the passage behind us, then we went around the corner and all that was behind us was darkness.

We kept going, staying as close together as
possible. Whenever I glanced back, all I could see was the ancient night of the underground earth. What if we had gone past a secret opening in the wall? What if something was following us now? I wished I had brought another flashlight so that I could see, even though I was afraid that shining a light back behind us might show that we were, indeed, being followed by a legion of horrors. An active imagination is not your best friend when you are making your way through an ancient tunnel in the earth that smells of mold and moist decay.

If this tunnel had been used by the Underground Railroad, then it must have scared the life out of the slaves who were taken through it. They must have truly been desperate for freedom to go down into the earth like this almost two centuries ago, their way lit not by a powerful flashlight, but by the light of candles or pine-knot torches. Two centuries ago? This tunnel felt much older than that. Too much older. I found myself wondering just how long ago it had been carved through the stone and who had really made it. And when my ready imagination suggested an answer, I shivered and tried not to think of it.

Suddenly the tunnel widened. The three of us found ourselves standing side by side. The roof of the passageway rose above us, and there was the echoing feel of dark space around us. There were age-blackened, thick wooden beams here, used to prop up the high ceiling. I touched one with my hand, feeling the rough wood, so far from the sun that once made it the strong, tall trunk of a tree. You could see why such beams were needed. This place seemed much more unstable than the rock-walled passageway we’d just emerged from. There were small piles of rubble here and there, some that seemed to have recently fallen from the roof. I wondered if we were under one of the roads that had been built long after this tunnel was gouged out. Was it the road vibrations from heavy trucks that had made those piles of stones fall? What was it like down here when the construction workers on that street near our house set off one of their blasts? Would these old beams succeed in holding this tunnel from collapse for another century? For another year? Another hour?

Mr. Patel held the light of his torch to the floor.

“Look here,” he said, leaning close.

The drag marks were gone, as if whoever had been dragged had either started to walk or been picked up. Something metal glittered on the floor over to the side. Neither Roger nor Mr. Patel saw it, but I bent down and grabbed it up, knowing what it was. It was the one thing that had been missing from the handbag. There was no doubt now. Aunt Lyssa had been brought this way.

“Mr. Patel,” I whispered.

“Wait,” he said, “I hear something.”

He swung the torch in an upward arc, then angled it down. There, ten feet in front of us, the floor of the cave fell away into a pit. I couldn’t tell how deep it was, but I didn’t want to look. Mr. Patel lifted the light and moved it slowly to the left.

I’m here.

Did I hear those words spoken in a harsh whisper or just imagine them? The hair stood up on the back of my neck.

I’m here.

Have you ever walked into a dark room and suddenly felt the sticky strands of an unseen spider’s web across your face? Well, that is just how those words, words that only I seemed able to hear, felt to
me. I felt like a little fly, its futile wings becoming more entangled no matter how hard it struggles, waiting for a hungry predator’s poison-dripping pincers to bite down and suck out its life.

“Mr. Patel,” I said in my softest voice.

Mr. Patel didn’t answer. His attention was riveted on his flashlight beam. It had picked out something in the softer earth farther along the cave floor. Something that looked like the indistinct tracks of large, shuffling feet.

“He’s here,” I said, turning to Roger and poking him with my elbow. “Roger, I know he’s here.”

I clutched the little cylinder I’d picked up so hard that I thought the metal would crush like a soda can.

Mr. Patel held up his left hand, still slowly moving the light of the flashlight farther along the wall. “Hush, hush,” he said. “There.”

The beam of light picked out the shape of something creeping across the floor. Then, as it moved farther into the light, that something became a human hand. The moving torch found an arm connected to that hand, a shoulder, and then the shape of a person crawling on the dirt floor of the cave,
a person who made a soft moaning sound as she weakly tried to pull herself forward. My heart leaped in my chest.

“Aunt Lyssa!”

The three of us reached her at the same time. She was only half conscious. As Mr. Patel helped her sit up, Roger put down his own flashlight and pulled out his handkerchief to wipe the dirt from her face. I was so stiff with shock that all I could do was stare down at her.

“Aunt Lyssa,” I said, “Aunt Lyssa.”

I couldn’t think of anything else to say, just those two words. I’d been so certain she was dead that it was just as much a surprise finding her alive. She opened her eyes and looked up at me.

“Madeline,” she said weakly, a little smile coming over her face, her eyes squinting from the light of the torch. “Where am I?”

I didn’t know how to answer her. It was as if I suddenly had too many words to say, but none of them seemed adequate. I mean, how do you tell a grown-up used to the common-sense, everyday world that they’ve just been knocked unconscious and then dragged underground by a midnight monster
out of some Indian legend who wants to drink their niece’s blood? I took a deep breath, knowing that I had to try.

But I never got the chance.

“Oh God!” Aunt Lyssa said, pushing herself back against the wall of the cave and pointing behind us. Her voice was hoarse with terror. “Oh my God! What’s that?”