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“It worked,” Kat gasps.
I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t.
I leave the key in the hole and pull open the door. It’s heavy, and it takes all my strength, plus Brom helping, for me to pull it open, the hinges groaning loudly.
The scent of decay wafts out of the darkness, causing all of us to cough.
“It smells like death,” I manage to say, my eyes watering as I cover my nose with my forearm. “Let me guess, you still want to go inside?”
“Yes,” Kat says, but her voice trembles.
Brom grabs the candle from me and steps forward.
Kat and I follow and look around.
The light doesn’t go very far, but it doesn’t need to.
I’ve seen enough.
We’re in a long, oval shaped room. Giant spiderwebs cover the walls, coming down from the ceiling and anchoring to the middle of the room. Though each web is empty, the strands look thick enough, and the webs are large enough, to support a spider the size of a pony.
And though there isn’t much else in the room, there remains a few bones stuck to the strands. A rib here, a pelvis there, a shattered femur, a broken clavicle.
All human.
Dear God.
“What is this place?” Kat whispers.
I put my hand on her back in a vain attempt to comfort her, but I have no answers.
“I think we should leave,” I say. “Right now. Before that door closes on us and locks us in here and whatever it is that is kept in this room comes out.”
This time, no one wants to be the hero. All three of us turn and hurry out of the room and into the damp air of the tunnel. Brom and I push against the door until it closes, and I quickly lock it, shoving the key into my pocket.
Then, without wasting any time, we leave the tunnel, go up the stairs, out of the custodian’s closet and back into the hall, hoping the nightmare stays in the basement.
Chapter 29
Kat
None of us slept. After what we discovered in the basement of the building, the three of us went back to Crane’s bedroom, locked the door, sprinkled more salt around the perimeter, and then waited for daylight. There was no chance that I would go back to my dorm room alone, not after that, so we did what we could to be comfortable. Crane gallantly gave me the bed and laid out his coat and towels on the floor for himself. Brom gladly took the bed with me, enjoying the sight of Crane beneath him.
But other than Brom holding me through the night, which I appreciated, we kept our hands to ourselves and talked the whole night through, trying to make sense of what we saw and why Vivienne Henry showed it to us.
We came to the same conclusion.
There’s something awful in the basement.
Something that’s been eating humans.
Those humans may or may not be the teachers that have gone missing. They might be people procured from town, drifters in the area, or they might be students too, perhaps the ones early on who were sent home because they weren’t cut out for the academics of the school, or so the Sisters said.
Either way, the basement was a place you didn’t want to end up.
“And Simon,” I say, my mouth tasting sour at the thought. “He said his mother lived in the basement. Do you think she was…in that room? Or are their other rooms, other basements? Did he have to visit his mother while she was hanging from a giant spiderweb?”
“For the sake of our sanity,” Crane says, getting to his feet and peering out the window. “Let’s assume there are other basements, ones that don’t have giant spiders in them. The sun is almost up.”
I groan, relieved that the day is breaking, but I’m so dizzyingly tired that I just want to sleep for days and days.
“Promise me,” I say, leaning my head against the wall. “When Brom is free from the horseman and we leave this place, that we find an inn somewhere with the largest bed in the world, and we proceed to stay on that bed and sleep and have sex for days on end?”
Crane lets out a groan as he fixes his eyes on me. “That is music to my ears, sweet witch.”
Brom, however, doesn’t say anything. I turn my head to look at him beside me on the bed, and he’s staring straight up at the ceiling. A cold finger of panic works its way down my spine. He hasn’t been alright for a while now, and it’s not just the horseman. Ever since our tryst in the barn he’s been quieter and more despondent than usual.
Or maybe it is the horseman. Brom has always been mercurial, but who knows what it’s truly like to live with someone else inside you.
