by E. A. House
From the sympathetic look her mom gave her as she folded the sheet of graphing paper in half and handed it back, Maddison knew they were not just talking about cyphers.
“Well, sitting on the couch feeling miserable isn’t helping you any,” her mom declared. “So, go, get—go deal with whatever has you so wound up,” she ordered, shaking out the throw pillows and fluffing the blanket that went over the back of the couch, scattering potato-chip crumbs everywhere. “Read for a while. Take a walk, it’s a nice sunny day—go finally have that fight with the boy your father’s so worried about.”
“Mom, I’m not—”
“Sweetie, you’re trying to avoid something.”
Maddison groaned, but her mother had always been both perceptive and even more stubborn than her father, so Maddison gave in with just enough bad grace to soothe her wounded pride. She stomped off to her room, threw on a pair of jeans and sensible shoes, and after a moment of hesitation grabbed her fanny pack as well, because she was in a foul enough mood that she didn’t care if she got caught in a church with an EMF meter and a headlamp. And if she stayed in a foul mood all the way to Saint Erasmus, she wouldn’t have to think about the fact that she was going to go visit the church.
The church was just barely within walking distance of Maddison’s house, and Maddison walked that distance with a purpose, which left her sweaty and out of breath and hardly less grumpy than when she started. Jogging, Maddison thought to herself, stopping with both hands on the iron stair rail and taking deep breaths of flower-scented air, was going to have to go back in her morning routine. Being this was out of breath was embarrassing.
It also didn’t do much to improve her black mood. So it was probably a good thing that Maddison didn’t meet Chris and Carrie when she stomped up the front steps of the church. She’d have bitten someone’s head off. Then actually getting inside the cool and dimly lit interior of the church had the not-entirely-welcome effect of calming Maddison down.
The McRaes were vaguely Catholic. Maddison’s maternal grandparents were regular weekly churchgoers, so habit took over and Maddison sat down in a pew to take a few deep breaths and mentally send a prayer heavenward, because that was what you did in church.
Our Father who art in heaven, she thought, give me patience. Or the strength to forgive? If that will help? I have no idea who I’m angrier at, Dad or Chris. Actually, I might not even be angry at either of them, but if that’s the case then I am angry that I’m not angry that I wasn’t asked if I wanted to get mixed up in this whole mess. But then, it’s not that I don’t want to be involved. I do. I just wish I’d known what it was I was getting into before I got into it. I’m in this up to the neck anyway—in fact, I think I’m in something up to the neck anyway because of Dad, so it’s a little insulting that they think keeping parts of the truth in the dark will make me safer than telling me everything and letting me help.
. . . oh. Well then.
Suddenly, Maddison wished she’d been less irritated and had caught up with Chris and Carrie at the church at noon. If she wanted to be involved in the search for the San Telmo, then stubbornly extracting herself from further fact-finding missions was not useful, and anyway, where on earth could Chris and Carrie be? The church wasn’t that big.
It was at this point that Maddison, who had been sitting in a pew at about the middle of the church, almost jumped out of her skin at the sound of an almighty crash.
She stood up, uncertain, trying to pinpoint the source of the violent but muted noise. The problem with being raised vaguely Catholic, of course, was that Maddison thought that poking her nose into the church basement was rude in a way that Chris and Carrie didn’t. Also, because she knew what the interior of a Catholic church was supposed to look like it had not occurred to her to go looking for doors that were supposed to be locked.
And anyway, Maddison thought as she edged through the half-open door behind the statue of Saint Anthony, she’d never actually been inside this particular Catholic church, let alone with all the lights out, most churches didn’t store their Christmas pageant stuff in a room directly off the main church, and hello, that was a scary camel.
Maddison carefully turned the camel around so it was not looking at her, and wandered farther into the room. There were an impressive number of old hymnals stacked on the tables, a statue of Saint Francis that someone was halfway through repainting, and . . . behind the rack of costumes she thought she heard whispering. Remembering every single one of the legends about Saint Erasmus being haunted, Maddison swallowed both her fear and her common sense and edged around the coat rack. And found a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only”—which Maddison was not—with a hook-and-eye latch that was hanging suspiciously open.
This is a terrible idea, Maddison told herself as she pushed the door open, a terrible, terrible idea. It opened into a pitch black room that smelled faintly of long-undisturbed dust. But at least, Maddison thought, the latch was hanging open, which decreased the chances of this being a ghost she was chasing since ghosts were fond of walking right through doors without unlocking them.
The voices, if there ever had been voices, had ceased altogether by the time Maddison landed harder than she’d intended to on a step that was steeper than she’d thought, but this was not actually Maddison’s worst moment of carelessly rushing in. Her worst moment of carelessly rushing in was when she began walking farther into the room while digging her head lamp out of her fanny pack, instead of sensibly waiting to get a light before she went farther into the room. Her attention was focused half on digging around in her fanny pack and half on watching where she was going, but then, ghosts were generally not solid and a live person wouldn’t be able to see her unless they were wearing night-vision goggles.
Shoot, and she’d left her pair at home, locked in a drawer because they were technically her mom’s and even more expensive than the EMF meter.
So, of course, Maddison managed only three steps before her foot landed on air instead of solid ground, and she toppled forward and down. Somebody screamed, and it was most likely her, but Maddison was far too busy trying to fend off whatever she’d landed on, which was alive, and moving, and all the while also trying to get her breath back after landing hard—on something alive and moving—and it was only when the until-now-unnoticed third person off to her left turned a light on that Maddison got a good look at who she was trying desperately to fend off.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Maddison said.
Carrie at least had the grace to look sheepish. Chris just looked delighted to see her, until he apparently realized where they were and that the last time they’d spoken Maddison had stormed out on him, at which point he made a valiant attempt to look distressed instead. It didn’t work.
“Okay,” Maddison said when glaring furiously at Chris got boring. Plus, it was hard to glare at someone when you were both mostly in the dark. “I have to admit this is a new one.” She stood up, the better to fold her arms and look irritated, and tried to smack some of the dust out of her jeans. The dust in her mouth, bitter and gritty, was bad enough. “When you said you were going to a church to look for clues I thought you meant the stained glass windows had clues in them or something, not that you were planning to fall down a well.”
“Falling down a well wasn’t part of my plan,” Chris said.
“Then what was?” Maddison asked. Chris hesitated, and it didn’t actually matter if he was stopping because he’d gotten a spider in his eye and needed to blink it out, Maddison had had enough.
“Don’t,” she said, and she knew her voice came out nasty and she didn’t care. “If you can’t tell me the truth, the whole truth, and the truth as you know it when you found it, I don’t want to hear it. I am sick,” she continued, and kicked a brick into the opposite wall, hard, “of being kept in the dark for my own protection”—she used violent air quotes on that last word, even though they could barely see them in the light from one measly phone flashlight—“when I hav
e been dealing with this for longer than you have!”
There was a ringing silence, and then Chris said, “Longer?” in a small voice. Maddison discovered that it was hard to explain a secret you only half understood yourself.
“I know my dad is hiding something,” she finally said, and was glad it was dark so she didn’t have to see Chris’s face in detail. “I know it has something to do with the San Telmo. I don’t know what, he won’t tell me, he’s never told me, but he’s been hiding it for a very long time. And I can deal with that, because he’s my dad, and I’ve trusted him my whole life, but it still—still scares me.” Great, now she was crying; she was going to get dust in her eyes. “So I can’t handle another person pulling the same thing.” Maddison swallowed, cleared her throat, and added, “And the whole ‘it’s for your own protection’ thing won’t work, we’re the same age and I’m stuck in this stupid well just the same as you.”
Then she tried to wipe tears off using the underside of her shirt, and there was a thwack and a yelp from the general vicinity of Chris and Carrie.
“Ow!” Chris said, which meant Carrie was the one thwacking people. “Maddison, I’m sorry. We—I—we don’t know much more than I already told you,” he admitted, “but, well, your dad was kind of . . . scaring . . . us.”
“The whole I’m-going-to-take-this-archivist-job-really-quickly-even-though-I-already-refused-it-three-times thing was scaring you?” Maddison asked, slowly lowering herself to the ground where she’d been standing. “Imagine that. It was certainly scaring me.”
Ow, brick chips. Not fun to sit on.
“And he kind of turned up at Aunt Elsie’s office when I was cleaning it out and wouldn’t leave me alone,” Chris added. “He was polite and helpful and everything!” he hurried to add. “It was just too much right after Aunt Elsie died and I was all paranoid about—everything. Somebody had ransacked the office before I got there, too.”
“Dad mentioned that,” Maddison said, startled.
“Really?” Chris asked.
“Yeah, in passing.”
“That’s new,” Chris said. He sounded bewildered. The whole conversation was strangely unreal, especially since Maddison was sitting in the bottom of a well in the dark and couldn’t see Chris or Carrie.
“What Chris is dancing around saying,” Carrie cut in, trying to be calm and logical and missing only by a hair, “is that neither one of us wanted to admit to someone we’d only just met and who we both really liked that we were slightly suspicious of her dad. And yes, I asked you to come to the Archive with us because you were Dr. McRae’s kid—because I didn’t want to talk to your dad and you were actually approachable and not, like, staring creepily at Chris.”
“Oh,” Maddison said.
“Also I lost the necklace on purpose because we had all Aunt Elsie’s stuff packed and we still hadn’t found the floorboard we were looking for.” Carrie actually sounded guilty.
“But then someone came in and stole it from the office,” Chris added. “I know, because it was in Sketchy Guy’s bag when he broke into our house. I stole it back.”
“Did you leave it in a desk drawer?” Maddison asked, not even bothering to ask who Sketchy Guy was because this conversation had gone so far past bizarre she didn’t even care anymore. “Because my dad did say there was a necklace in a desk drawer, and when I asked him if he recognized it he said he just turned it in to the lost and found.”
“Yes, but I called the reception desk and they said there wasn’t a necklace in the lost and found,” Carrie explained.
“Oh-kayyy,” Maddison said. “That’s weird. Anything else you feel like telling me?”
“Carrie probably sprained her ankle,” Chris volunteered. “And she had a flashlight but she dropped it when we fell.” Which was why they were all squinting at each other in the light of Carrie’s cell phone.
“Also,” Carrie said, “unless one of you has freakishly good phone reception we can’t call Professor Griffin for help. There’s no reception down here. Or at least I have no reception,” she added as an afterthought.
Chris groaned and checked just as Maddison did, but they all had the same service provider, which apparently did not offer enough coverage for using your phone at the bottom of a pit for anything other than eerie lighting.
“Well. It’s a well, we fell down it, and if I can ever tell anyone about this I’ll never hear the end of it,” Chris moaned. “Can you imagine all the Lassie jokes?”
“In a frightening turn of events,” Carrie said, “I actually agree with something you said previously, Chris. This is a cistern.”
“It’s the old one, from before the church had running water or was, you know, part of a neighborhood,” Maddison explained, patting the ground around where she was sitting for her headlamp. Everything else had survived the fall into the we—cistern, but she’d dug the stupid thing out of her fanny pack right before she’d fallen in and been holding it when she fell. She had probably dropped it. And she liked that headlamp.
“It’s supposed to be where the ghost comes from,” Carrie added. Her voice wobbled only a little bit.
“Exactly how much research into this church did you do?” Chris asked. He had gotten back to his feet and was groping for the wall.
“Just what was online about the ghost of Cesar Francisco,” Maddison answered.
At exactly the same time Carrie said, “A lot, because I couldn’t figure out what we were supposed to be looking for?” Maddison felt a brief flare of glee at not being the only person who researched ghosts anymore. “We’re looking for a parish register, we think,” Carrie said to Maddison, as her cousin tripped over something in the background and called the floor an unkind name and they all tried very hard not to think about the ghost. There were a lot of variations to the basic story, since the mysterious disappearance of Cesar Francisco, along with the story of the screaming caves, were Archer’s Grove’s two most popular legends. In some versions, Cesar Francisco had fallen into the cistern in the church’s courtyard as he was taking his last breath, and the fact that the cistern had been both dredged and drained since then—with no body turning up—had done nothing to stop the rumors that the church was most haunted in the area around the cistern. Where they all were right now. In the dark.
“What’s in the parish register?” Maddison asked. “And . . . what is Chris doing?”
“I’m trying to see how big this cistern is,” Chris said, as Carrie shined her light in his general direction, revealing Chris, a surprisingly sturdy-looking stone wall, and a scattered pile of masonry. He waved. “Why is it so full of bricks and stuff, anyway?” he added, giving one an experimental kick.
“Because . . .” Carrie leaned back against the wall, thinking. Maddison decided against running into a wandering Chris in the dark or standing up to trip over more bricks, and scooted over to sit next to Carrie. “When they stopped using the cistern they boarded it over so nobody would fall in,” Carrie explained, “and then somebody built an outbuilding over it, and then they extended the church which just sort of absorbed it, and I guess it’s just been sitting here crumbling into pieces for years waiting for people dumb enough to fall through.”
“Like you did?” Maddison asked.
“Well, like Chris did,” Carrie said, and then they both winced as Chris tripped over another stone. The floor was a tangled mess of ancient brick dust and crumbling bricks, with some scraps of old cloth and a sprinkling of splintered wood, making it difficult to stay balanced walking across the floor, let alone climb out. And to make matters more difficult the boards across the cistern had not all fallen into disrepair. There were still some crisscrossing the cistern, and in the light of a single cell phone Maddison and Carrie could even see places where someone had long ago put down particle board to cover places where the original boards had fallen through.
“We aren’t the first people to fall in,” Maddison said. “Or, well, this isn’t the first time the boards have fallen in.”
“Particle board,” Carrie said. “Also, they had a serious dispute over keeping the old cistern or filling it in when they got indoor plumbing in the early forties.”
“You did a lot of research on this church,” Maddison commented.
“You should see her actual school reports,” Chris suggested. “They’re scary. And detailed. And once, when we were in eighth grade, her teacher told her she didn’t need an annotated bibliography and she cried.”
“I . . . did,” Carrie admitted. “I was afraid I’d get thrown in jail if I plagiarized. And I never got into the habit of throwing things together last minute,” she added, presumably for Chris’s benefit.
“So, research?” Maddison asked.
“Yes!” Carrie said. “Research. Lots and lots of research, because I had no idea what I was looking for—we think we need a parish register from 1725 written by the priest who witnessed the fleet going down—and I had no idea how to find it.”
“Which . . . is why you were in that storage room?” Maddison asked.
“The original Spanish mission that was out on the coast somewhere eventually merged with another parish and all their stuff moved here,” Carrie explained. “So if anything from 1725 survived it should be here.”
“Do we even know the church still has its old parish registers?” Maddison asked.
“Aunt Elsie found something,” Chris said simply. “And this was the last thing she was looking at.”
It was pretty hard to argue with that. “I think I might have an Ace bandage in my bag,” Maddison said instead, “if someone else knows how to wrap a twisted ankle.” She paused and thought her offer over. “Or if you do that when you twist an ankle. Do you wrap a twisted ankle?”