Secrets of the Old Church

by E. A. House

  “He has dead eyes,” Chris muttered, but he pushed past the nightmare camel and into the room anyway. It was darker in here, with the only light coming from the exit sign over the door and one frosted window, and it was kind of dusty, but Chris and Carrie set to rummaging with a vengeance. And, of course, with the knowledge that they probably weren’t supposed to be back in the storage room.

  Despite containing a vast and unorganized stash of Christmas decorations, stacks of old sheet music, tons of dusty devotional books, and a green three-ring binder with “Saint Vincent de Paul Society minutes, do not lose” scribbled across the front in black marker, the storage room refused to give up the ancient parish registers. Chris was just about to give up, tell Carrie there was obviously nothing here for them to find, and suggest leaving when he knocked a box of round plastic Christmas ornaments off the top of a pile of other boxes. They went rolling everywhere, and he had to chase half of the balls under an overloaded clothes rack holding several sad-looking sweaters and all the Christmas pageant robes. Which led to the discovery of yet another door.

  This one was so sloppily painted the same off-white as the wall that it must have been actually painted over at some point, and it had a hook-and-eye latch holding it closed. It also had a laminated sign taped to it that said “Authorized Personnel Only” in bright but faded red letters, but this didn’t stop Chris from hissing at Carrie to come over to see.

  Carrie fought her way through the clothes rack and then sighed. “We aren’t authorized,” she pointed out. “And you just made me come look at a door you found hidden behind a bunch of coats, there had better not be a land of eternal winter in there.”

  “They’re capes and robes, not fur coats,” Chris protested, settling the Christmas ornaments in their box. “And I think it might be the side storage room,” he admitted, unhooking the door and pushing it open.

  The room was certainly half finished, whatever its initial purpose had been. There was one steep step down into a cramped rectangular room with a low ceiling, a dirt floor, and a single dim yellow light bulb, which flickered grudgingly on when Carrie found a light switch just inside the door. But more importantly, as far as Chris was concerned, were the four sturdy metal chests—the better term might be footlocker, Chris wasn’t sure—lining the far walls. They had closed lids, but two of those lids had scraps of paper poking out, and that looked promising.

  “This might be the oldest part of the church,” he said to Carrie as he picked his way down the step. She followed dubiously.

  “The stucco does look cruder,” Carrie admitted, fumbling in her shoulder bag and finally pulling out a flashlight—if it had been dim in the previous room it was nearly impossible to see in this one, even with the light on—and making Chris realize that he’d forgotten his own flashlight. “But we might be pushing the whole ‘open doors for all God’s people’ thing a bit far right now.”

  “I’m just going to look,” Chris said, carefully easing the lid of the chest closest to the door open and discovering a mess of crumbling newspaper wrapped around teacups. That was disappointing, but when he moved on to another chest along the right side of the wall Chris unearthed a leather-bound collection of the works of Charles Dickens—a very old leather-bound collection of Dickens, probably the oldest thing he’d found yet, even if it was in terrible condition, and suddenly they were—maybe, hopefully—getting warmer. Carrie even looked interested when Chris held up one of the volumes. Even though the chest he was poking through didn’t have anything that looked like a parish register, the one up against the far wall had a padlock, although it wasn’t locked. Maybe there was something valuable inside it?

  “I mean,” Carrie continued, following Chris and gesturing with her flashlight so the beam of light went everywhere, “that even beyond the ‘we shouldn’t be in here’ issue, we’ve now hit the ‘we can’t convincingly explain why we’re in here’ issue, and should—”

  But what it was Carrie thought they should do (most likely turn around and go back home, after putting everything back the way they’d found it) was drowned out in the horrible sound of old, rotted wood giving way. The floor, as it turned out, was not simple packed dirt, but packed dirt over old and rotted wooden boards that covered the old church cistern. It had survived this long only because nobody had walked across it in years—until Chris, on his way to the trunk, just had. Chris had tried to walk over a patch of floor already weakened by heat, humidity, and bugs. A large patch of floor, the individual boards of which buckled inward and dumped Chris, Carrie, and a shower of dirt and splintered wood seven feet down into what they later learned was an old, dry basin for collecting and storing water.

  Then, as if to put a cap on the entire disaster, the lone and ancient lightbulb swaying in the center of the room flickered twice and went out.

  It took Chris an agonizing handful of seconds to catch his breath and realize that nothing was injured beyond some painful bruising. Luckily, he’d landed on his side and not on any kind of debris. The cistern was square rather than the more sensible circle, relatively large, and filled with rubble, which Chris discovered when he staggered to his feet, tripped over a what felt like a chunk of brick and mortar, and landed on something soft and squishy which turned out to be Carrie.

  “Ow!”

  “Sorry,” Chris said, scooting backwards on his rear. There was the sound of shifting debris—probably broken bits of the floor that had come down with them—and then Carrie hissing. That . . . wasn’t a good sign. Carrie usually hissed because she was angry, in pain, or pretending to be a snake for the school play and trying out method acting. The last play she’d been in had been the disaster-laden, student-written adaptation of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi in seventh grade, in which she had played the snake Nagaina. Afterwards, she swore a blood oath, with Chris witnessing, that she would never again be in a theatrical production. Which meant that she was now either angry or in pain, neither of which were good.

  “You okay?” Chris asked, and there was an ominous pause. “Carrie?” he tried again, now flat-out worried, “are you okay?”

  “For a given value of okay,” Carrie said finally, voice tight. “I think I twisted my ankle when I fell.”

  “Twisted?” Chris asked. He carefully reached out, wishing his eyes would hurry up and adjust to the darkness, and found his cousin’s foot. She didn’t twitch away so he decided he’d got the uninjured one and tried to give a reassuring squeeze.

  “I don’t think it’s hurting badly enough for it to be broken,” Carrie said, after some shifting that was probably her testing the ankle’s range of movement. “But I’m also not sure if I can stand on it, much less climb out of a pit in the dark.”

  “Well, can you try if I help you stand?” Chris asked, deciding not to point out that he thought the pit was technically a cistern. He took Carrie’s long, wordless sigh as an affirmative, or at least not as a definite no, and got to his own feet very carefully.

  The results were not encouraging. Chris managed not to trip over any more debris but it was a near thing, and when he managed to pull Carrie to her feet she wobbled alarmingly and couldn’t put any weight on her foot. Chris had to help her settle back on the floor in a more comfortable—well, less awkward position. To make matters even worse the cistern they’d fallen into was made of smooth, fitted stone and offered few handholds, and even when Chris’s eyes finally started to adjust to the lack of light he couldn’t see a good way out. And at some point in the midst of plummeting headfirst into a black pit—Carrie ordered Chris to stop being so dramatic with his descriptions—they’d lost Carrie’s flashlight.

  “Which serves me right for gesturing with it,” Carrie said glumly as Chris shuffled around the area where she’d landed and found nothing but dust and bricks. He found lots of dust and lots and lots of bricks, though, which did give him the start of an idea.

  “I think,” Chris said, settling himself on the ground next to Carrie, “that if we pile up the debris I might be able to climb out
and then pull you out. But I’m a little worried that I’ll pull the edges in on top of us when I try. Or actually,” he added as another thought struck him, “we could try calling Professor Griffin? He doesn’t work on Fridays and he likes us, maybe he wouldn’t ask many questions.”

  Carrie was nothing more than a slightly grayer blob in the blackness, but Chris was absolutely certain she was staring at him in amazement. He was pretty sure she had even forgotten the pain in her ankle she was staring at him in such amazement. “Yes,” Carrie said, after a period of intense staring that Chris was unable to see but could really feel, so perhaps she was developing x-ray vision. “Because Professor Griffin regularly finds us at the bottom of wells in churches we don’t even belong to. He won’t ask any questions.”

  “I think we’re actually in a cistern,” Chris offered. “If it were a well there’d be water down here.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Carrie sighed. “A cistern is a major part of the ghost story. I just thought there’d be a sign.”

  “Well, if you want to get technical there was that ‘authorized personnel only’ sign,” Chris said guiltily. “But in that case, I want to meet the person authorized to deal with haunted cisterns.”

  Carrie flicked a pebble at him, so Chris felt safe enough in poking her back, and was therefore startled when she suddenly grabbed his wrist tightly enough to hurt.

  “Wha—”

  “Shh!” Carrie breathed. “Do you hear that?”

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Chris sighed, but quietly. Now that Carrie had pointed it out he could hear it: there were footsteps coming towards them. Footsteps that were trying to be stealthy, if Chris’s admittedly limited stealth skills were right, since they were slow and careful but not deliberate, and whoever was creeping about did not know about the creaky floorboard in the middle of the back room.

  Chris abruptly remembered that odd warning from Cliff Dodson at the police station. He hadn’t even considered the possibility of being followed—and wasn’t it possible for someone to get out of jail if they posted bail, or did that not apply in murder cases? And for that matter, what exactly were the police charging Cliff Dodson with, anyway? Detective Hermann hadn’t actually said . . . and did the person now creaking around the storage room know Chris and Carrie had gone in and not come out?

  They did seem to know that there was a hidden room behind the choir robes, if the zip of metal hangers being pushed aside on a metal rack was any indication. Then there was a scuffling step over the doorway—Chris stopped breathing altogether and held as still as possible, Carrie doing the same right next to him, and hoped against hope that whoever it was would give up and go away after a brief glance into the room—and then a step, and another, right up to the edge of the cistern—and then there was an almighty splintering sound and a surprisingly restrained scream, and this time Chris had someone land on him. He was on edge and whoever had just landed on him was on edge and they spent probably a good two minutes wrestling frantically with each other before Carrie produced her cell phone from somewhere and turned its flashlight on, and then they got a good look at each other.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Maddison said.

  MANY PEOPLE HAD HAD FIGHTS WITH MADDISON. Several people had done things that she swore never to forgive them for; she was still pretending a certain cousin did not exist due to his putting bubblegum in her hair when she was six. Chris Kingsolver was not the first person Maddison had a fight with and he certainly wouldn’t be the last, but he was the first person to try apologizing by coded text message. Maddison wasn’t sure if this made her feel touched or angry, or if this just made Chris weird, but it was nevertheless what Maddison woke up to on the warm Friday morning that would see her fall into a deep, dark hole.

  She was half-asleep and enjoying it when her phone chimed, and chimed, and then chimed again, and finally she was all the way awake and scrambling on her bedside table for the still-chiming phone, which, when she managed a look, proved to be blowing up with texts from Chris. She hadn’t spoken to him since that day at the park, and she’d been civil but reserved with Carrie at work because she didn’t like dragging people into fights that weren’t really about them, and despite her dad’s unfortunately good advice she hadn’t yet even worked up the courage and righteous anger to explain to Chris why she was mad. And now Chris was texting her as if nothing had happened between them. Maddison sat up in bed and stared at the screen of her phone, which, if nothing else, proved that Chris was motivated, because he had sent her nine texts in a row, and they were all gibberish.

  LFMSCFNS, said the first one, and then . . .

  OOATHROO

  ORPEUIOR

  KSSRRDNR

  IOOACASY

  NRRSHYOS

  GRRMSSRO

  SYYUOORR

  OSSSRRYR

  “What on earth?” Maddison said out loud to herself, and then frowned. The last letter in each of the texts, when read vertically, spelled the word SORRY and then SORR, which suggested . . .

  Chris, Maddison thought, pulling graphing paper and pen out of a drawer and starting to write out the texts in a grid, no sane person apologizes via code. This doesn’t even count as an apology. But once she’d picked out the pattern it was easy to figure out the message, and reading the texts as a whole, vertically (much like a crossword puzzle), Maddison made out LOOKING FOR MAP ST ERASMUS CHURCH FRIDAY NOON with SORRY filling in everywhere Chris had had a spare space. It was both single-minded to the point of ridiculousness and strangely touching, and also what did Chris and Carrie expect to find at the church? They weren’t even members there. And why did Chris think Maddison cared? Maddison did not care. Maddison did not want anything to do with Chris and Carrie. Maddison was not at all touched that Chris thought she was smart enough to figure out a code she’d never seen before all on her own. And Maddison, Maddison thought glumly to herself, was referring to herself in the third person. Maddison was also lying to herself. That, too, was easier in the third person.

  Maddison made herself cereal with chocolate milk and ate it while watching three episodes of the world’s most horrifically scripted and cheesy and badly researched adventure-exploration reality show in existence, otherwise known as Treasure Hunters: Adventures with Robin Redd. The subtitle was a bit misleading, since the hero failed to find Atlantis, the Loch Ness monster, Timbuktu, or anything more thrilling than a runaway donkey. Then Maddison painted her fingernails with the bright orange nail polish she’d gotten for Christmas. She very resolutely refused to even so much as entertain the idea of going over to the church at noon and helping Chris and Carrie look for the map they were trying to find. She was refusing to do so with such a vengeance that at twelve-twenty her mother swiped the potato chips away, turned off the television, and said, “Shoo.”

  “Mom! I was watching that!” Maddison yelped, turning the television back on.

  “No,” Maddison’s mom said. “You were a million miles away. You hate hospital dramas.”

  On screen, several nurses in scrubs ran past, calling for a doctor, and yelling about . . . ear transplants?

  “Sweetheart, you didn’t even notice your father walking in, changing the channel, setting it to record, and walking out the front door,” her mom said.

  “Really?” This was Maddison’s dad’s secret favorite show. Her dad liked hospital dramas, the more painfully inaccurate the better, because, he had explained to Maddison once, they had nothing to do with his line of work. Historical inaccuracies in television programs drove him up the wall, across the ceiling, and out an adjacent window to go scream at pigeons in the park, to use one of Maddison’s grandmother’s favorite, if perhaps hardest to understand, sayings. This was because her father was a history professor by trade. The number of teaching assistants he had traumatized when they suggested he use a popular but historically inaccurate movie in class was equal only to the number of popular but historically inaccurate movies out there waiting to be suggested to Dr. McRae, and both were
surprisingly high. Maddison’s mother, in contrast, took great vindictive pleasure in watching anything at all related to art and art history, and critiquing it mercilessly. Maddison fell somewhere between her two parents, when she wasn’t feeling mildly embarrassed for the actors, or puzzled as to why any show that devoted six episodes to an ear transplant storyline was still on the air. Which reminded Maddison. “Wait, what was Dad doing home from work on a Friday?”

  “He was at the office late last night so he took a half-day today,” her mom said, helping herself to a potato chip. “And then I think called him about something to do with the hit-and-run, because he’s gone down to the police station to annoy people.” She rolled her eyes, closed up the potato-chip bag, and made shooing motions at Maddison, who reluctantly sat up and moved the pillows, knocking the sheets of graphing paper she’d been glaring at off the couch as she did.

  “Oh,” her mom said, looking at the sheet she’d picked up. “Nice transposition. Are you getting into cyphers now?”

  “Transposition?” Maddison asked.

  “This is a basic example of a transposition cypher,” her mom explained, thoughtful and a bit distant, as though she were using skills that had been dormant for years. “You take the message you need to send and rearrange the letters so someone intercepting the message can’t read it.”

  “Huh,” Maddison said, wondering how her mom happened to know that.

  “An interest in cyphers would mostly involve paper and lemon juice,” her mom continued hopefully, “and you wouldn’t spend so much time wandering around in the dark in abandoned buildings of dubious structural stability!”

  Maryanne McRae had never believed in ghosts and was always distantly worried that Maddison was going to get into physical danger while looking for them. But Maddison had very recent experience that suggested that an interest in cyphers was just as dangerous as an interest in ghosts—Maddison hadn’t been in any danger looking for ghosts until she’d added Chris, Carrie, and a cypher to the mix—and anyway, why did her mom know this much about cyphers? Did everyone, and Maddison was just the odd person out? If Chris didn’t have such an interest in cyphers Maddison doubted any of this would have happened, but she couldn’t entirely blame him for it and what ended up coming out of her mouth was simply, “I hate cyphers, they’re confusing.”