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“Mal? What? What the hell are you doing here, what . . . ? And, get away—get away from the edge! That’s how I got down here. Back up!”
“Harry said you’d be coming back down to the Read House, and I wanted to see you before we left. I saw you just now, down there. I tried to get your attention, but you ran off so fast. Hey, who’s that?”
“That’s Nick. Nick, that’s Malachi. ”
“That’s—wait a minute. That Malachi?”
“That’s the one, yeah. Hey, Malachi, I’m actually real happy to see you. We could use a hand here. Is there a rope or anything? Anything at all like that up there that you could use to help us out?”
He looked around, that shaggy blond head bobbing left to right, and not meeting with any resistance in the form of potentially helpful objects. “No. I don’t see anything like that. What’s that sound? And what’s that smell?”
“It’s—shit, Malachi. Not now. Later, okay? Now we need out. Or we need a way to get out quick. Where’s Harry?”
He looked a little hurt, but I was feeling too worried by the nearness of the sucking, sloshing feet to get worked up about it. “I lost him back at the Choo-Choo.
Well, no. Probably around the Read House. He knew where I was going. ”
“Is there any chance you could—”
“Eden,” Nick said my name with a note of panic kept loosely in check.
“Get Harry. You should try to get Harry—or any of the feds or cops you see running around out there. Go get them, and bring them here. We’re about to need some very serious assistance. ”
“Eden,” he said it again. He was waving the flashlight back towards the dark end of the tunnel. The walls were propped here and there with big square beams—the kind you see in old mines—but they looked like they’d fall apart if you touched them with your fingertips. They were so waterlogged and old they couldn’t possibly be offering much support.
And there, in the back—at the very, very edge of the light, maybe thirty or forty feet away from us, there was motion. Movement, in jerks and short reflections of the light on slime.
“Malachi, hurry!”
He scrambled above us and I heard more creaking, cracking; and I was afraid for a few seconds that he’d surely drop down to join us at any second. But whatever he was walking on held, and he crashed through the hole in the wall, almost certainly widening it with his body to get out so fast.
“Come on, superhero. Do something,” Nick said, taking a mud-anchored step back against me.
“For example?”
“Talk to them. They’re dead. They’re different dead people, remember?”
I tried. I tried for all I was worth—concentrating, as Dana had tried to tell me last year. She’d worked with me some, trying to give me focus for it, and I wanted to think I’d improved.
But I couldn’t make any kind of contact with them at all. I didn’t even sense them as present; they weren’t there, except that they were crawling towards us and gasping, wheezing, grimacing along the tunnel.
“I can’t,” I breathed, trying to lift one foot out of the muck and put it behind the other one—trying to retreat as far as I could, even though there wasn’t any room, really. “I can’t. There’s nothing there to talk to. ”
“They’re right there!” he shouted, gesturing with the flashlight as if I didn’t know good and well where they were.
“In body, sure. In spirit? Not so much. They’re empty, Nick. ”
“Then how come you gathered all that information above, in the water? All that shit about the church and the fire, and the little girl—”
“That’s it,” I said. “What you just said. The little girl. She’s the one doing this. She’s sending these ahead, moving them like pieces on a game board. ”
“But you said she didn’t want anything. ”
“No, I said she couldn’t be satisfied or stopped. Whatever she wants, she can’t have it. Whatever she’s looking for, it’s been gone for years. It’s only going to make her angrier, and more destructive. And you said it yourself, they’re right there—and I’m as open to them as I can possibly make myself, but I’m not getting a damn thing. ”
“Then what do we do?” He was backing up too, and there was nothing to back against. Either the tunnel ended there beneath the old building, or it had caved in beyond it. There was nowhere to go except into the earth, which was packed and wet where there should have been walls.
The stink was unbearable, and unbelievable.
