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Darla looked around. She picked up a hawk statue that was cast in bronze. It had heft and weight to it. “What about this?”
“It might work. We’ll give it a try,” Bree said, propping open the door. “Shall we?”
With Georgie waiting up top, we headed down the stairs, Bree going first, me coming after, and then Darla.
The basement was truly creep show–worthy. As we descended the narrow stairs, we had to hold onto the stone wall to the left. There was no railing, and the stairs were steep enough that one misstep would send us tumbling down headfirst. A bare bulb swung from the center of the basement below, its dim light serving to heighten the shadows behind the mass of boxes and clutter that crowded the room.
By the time we reached the bottom of the steps, I could see the compacted dirt that made up the top half of two walls. There was a hole in the dirt on one side, about a foot in diameter, and I wondered where it led to, and what—if anything—came through it.
Below the steps were shelves, with hundreds of empty mason jars lined up in rows. A few still had what must have been food in them, but the contents were bubbling, festering with bacteria. I didn’t want to be around when enough gas built up for them to blow.
In the center of the room were the stacks of moldy cardboard boxes, along with several wooden trunks. I didn’t want to touch anything down here—everything looked suspect and was covered with dust and spiderwebs. There was a fetid smell to the air, and the basement felt like it was closing in around us, exacerbating my fear of being trapped.
The last time I’d been in a room with this same feel was the day the Butcher captured Rian and me, and it took everything I had not to run back up the stairs. I was fighting both the fear of the present, and the all-too-vivid memory of the past.
“I suppose the best place to start is in the trunks,” I said. “They look old and like they may have been here a long time.”
As I spoke, a ripple raced through the room, like wind. Only there was no way for the breeze to get down here. In fact, I doubted that fresh air ever touched this space.
“This reminds me of some show on the Discovery channel—like when they find secret passages beneath a pyramid and follow it into a tomb, you know?” Darla shivered. “The energy’s thick and feels like a combination of soot and grease. Let’s get on with it so we can get out of here.”
“Good idea,” Bree said. “Are any of these your belongings?”
Darla shook her head. “No. There’s no way I’d bring anything down here to store until this mess is junked. Wewereplanning to clear out the basement first and finish it, but Kevin lost interest in the job a few days after we moved here.”
“Whatever those two old women are—and I’m not entirely sure they’re ghosts—they don’t want this space cleaned out. If their anchor is down here, that would disrupt them.” I knelt beside the nearest trunk and brushed away the cobwebs.
“E.G.T.” The initials were branded on the wood. “Does that ring a bell?”
Darla shook her head. “No, it doesn’t.”
I examined the lock. “It’s a simple padlock, but it’s rusted. I doubt if we can find the keys. Do you have a crowbar? We can probably pry it open.”
Bree jumped up. “I have one in my car. I’ll be right back,” she said, heading for the stairs.
“Should we go up, too?” Darla asked.
I shook my head. “No. She should be back soon.”
As we waited, I became aware of every sound, every movement. There was a faint skittering sound in the hole in the wall. I shone my flashlight into the recess and saw glittering eyes looking back at me. But it was a mouse, and mice didn’t scare me. At least it wasn’t some demon-rat or whatever might be lurking in the shadows.
There was a faint dripping sound. Darla and I cautiously followed it through the piles of junk to find a pipe near one wall, running from upstairs through the ceiling, that was dripping to the basement floor. I frowned, searching for a crack, then realized it was condensation that had built up. I wasn’t sure how it worked, but it looked relatively fresh, and the drip was so slow that the drops were drying before the tiny puddle grew larger.
“Oh, good grief,” Darla said, peeking in one of the cardboard boxes. “It looks like there are stacks ofJugs-A-Lugin here.”
“What’s that?” I asked, turning to follow the beam of her flashlight.
There, on the top of one of the old cardboard boxes, was a magazine with a monster set of boobs staring down the camera. The woman’s head wasn’t visible, as though it didn’t matter who it was, but the breasts were front and center.
“Well, the title doesn’t lie,” I said, snorting. “You say the box is full of those mags?”
“Yeah, looks like several years. From the 1970s, so it’s been…oh geeze…fifty years? The pages are covered with mildew. I don’t want to touch the crap down here. Mold in the air? Not good for the lungs. If we ever clear this house of whatever’s haunting it, I may hire a mold specialist to come in and sanitize this room.”
“Good idea,” I said. Mold was to blame for a number of respiratory and auto-immune conditions.
At that moment, Bree returned, carefully descending the stairs with the crowbar. She went over to the trunk and I held onto the wooden box as she slid the crowbar under the lock. As she bore down on it, the lever managed to pry the lock away from the wood. A moment later, with a final grunt, Bree added all her weight to the bar and the lock broke off.
She moved back and nodded to me. I swung the lid up, trying to keep as much distance as I could between the trunk and me. I didn’t want to be in the line of fire should there be some sort of magical trap.
