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Inside that deep black cleft, it was still and quiet.
As quiet as a tomb.
If Dylan was the type to believe in creepy folklore monsters, she might have imagined one could live in a hidden spot like this. But she didn't believe in monsters, never had. Aside from seeing the occasional dead person, who'd never caused her any harm, Dylan was about as practical - even cynical - as could be.
It was the reporter in her that made her curious to know what she might truly find inside the rock. Assuming you could trust the word of a dead woman, who did she think needed help? Was someone injured in there? Could someone have gotten lost way up here on this steep crag?
Dylan grabbed a small flashlight from an outer pocket of her backpack. She shined it into the opening, noticing just then that there were vague chisel marks around and within the crevice, as if someone had worked to widen it. Although not any time recently, based on the weathered edges of the tool's marks.
"Hello?" she called into the darkness. "Is anyone in here?"
Nothing but silence answered.
Dylan pulled off her backpack and carried it in one hand, her other hand wrapped around the slim barrel of her flashlight. Walking forward she could barely fit through the crevice; anyone larger than her would have been forced to go in sideways.
The tight squeeze only lasted a short distance before the space angled around and began to open up. Suddenly she was inside the thick rock of the mountain, her light beam bouncing off smooth, rounded walls. It was a cave - an empty one, except for some bats rustling out of a disturbed sleep overhead.
And from the look of it, the space was mostly manmade. The ceiling rose at least twenty feet over Dylan's head. Interesting symbols were painted on each wall of the small cavern. They looked like some odd sort of hieroglyphics: a cross between bold tribal markings and interlocking, gracefully geometric patterns.
Dylan walked closer to one of the walls, mesmerized by the beauty of the strange artwork. She panned the small beam of her flashlight to the right, breathless to find the elaborate decoration continuing all around her. She took a step toward the center of the cave. The toe of her hiking boot knocked into something on the earthen floor. Whatever it was clattered hollowly as it rolled away. Dylan swept her light over the ground and gasped.
Oh, shit.
It was a skull. White bone glowed against the darkness, the human head staring up at her with sightless, vacant sockets.
If this was the him the dead woman wanted Dylan to help out, it looked like she got there about a hundred years too late.
Dylan moved the light farther into the gloom, unsure what she was searching for, but too fascinated to leave just yet. The beam skidded over another set of bones - Jesus, more aged human remains scattered on the floor of the cave.
Goose bumps prickled on Dylan's arms from a draft that seemed to rise out of nowhere.
And that's when she saw it.
A large rectangular block of stone sat on the other side of the darkness. More markings like the ones covering the walls were painted onto the carved bulk of the object.
Dylan didn't have to move closer to realize that she was looking at a crypt. A thick slab had been placed over the top of the tomb. It was moved aside, skewed slightly off the stone crypt as if pushed away by incredibly strong hands.
Was someone - or something - laid to rest in there?
Dylan had to know.
She crept forward, flashlight gripped in suddenly perspiring fingers. A few paces away now, Dylan angled the beam into the opening of the tomb.
It was empty.
And for reasons she couldn't explain, that thought chilled her even more than if she'd found some hideous corpse turning to dust inside.
er One
The woman looked completely out of place in her pristine white blouse and tailored ivory pants. Long, coffee-dark hair cascaded over her shoulders in thick waves, not a single strand disturbed by the moist haze that hung in the air of the forest. She was wearing tall elegant heels, which hadn't seemed to keep her from climbing up a wooded path that had the other hikers around her huffing in the humid July heat.
At the crest of the steep incline, she waited in the shade of a bulky, moss-covered rock formation, unblinking as half a dozen tourists passed her by, some of them snapping pictures of the overlook beyond. They didn't notice her. But then, most people couldn't see the dead.
Dylan Alexander didn't want to see her either.
She hadn't encountered a dead woman since she was twelve years old. That she would see one now, twenty years later and in the middle of the Czech Republic, was more than a little startling. She tried to ignore the apparition, but as Dylan and her three traveling companions made their way up the path, the woman's dark eyes found her and rooted on her.
You see me.
