The Unquiet past

by Kelley Armstrong

  Tess jerked back. The book tumbled from her fingers. She grabbed for it, and her boot slipped. She started to fall but caught herself, her foot coming down hard on the rung below. Too hard. A snap as the old wood gave way.

  Tess scrambled for a hold, but she knocked the ladder instead, sending it whizzing along the rails without her. As she fell, she tried to twist, to flip, to do anything to avoid landing on her back.

  She hit the floor with a sickening crunch, as if every bone in her body had snapped. Only she kept falling. She felt the impact and heard the crash and the crunch and the snap, and she kept falling.

  Falling through the floor. Through the rotted boards.

  All four limbs shot out, desperate to catch something, anything, but it was too late. The floor had broken, and she’d crashed through.

  Her head struck something, pain lashing through her for one split second before everything went dark.

  Eight

  TESS WOKE TO complete darkness. Her arms shot out, heart pounding, certain she would flail against the sides of a wooden box and hear the skitter of dirt. But when she leaped up, nothing stopped her. Nothing except a screaming pain in her head that forced her to her knees as she doubled over, heaving and gagging. She lifted one hand to her head and gingerly prodded a rising bump.

  Knocked out. She’d been knocked out and thrown into…

  She inhaled the stink of mustiness and felt the dirt beneath her fingers.

  A basement. She’d been knocked unconscious and thrown into a basement.

  There’d been a man. She remembered running though the woods, trees lashing at her, vines catching her feet. Then a cry. A fall.

  She’d fallen? No…She squeezed her eyes shut and focused on the memory. He’d fallen. Then she’d escaped, and there’d been a house.

  A house…

  A house and a broken window and a ladder. Books. Falling. Rotted floor.

  No one had thrown her in the basement. She’d fallen.

  Tess exhaled so suddenly that her stomach heaved again. She gagged. Then she sat back on her haunches and kept breathing deeply, getting her bearings.

  Not kidnapped. Not knocked out. Well, yes, knocked out, but only by her own stupidity. All she had to do was find the stairs and get back to the main floor.

  She needed the flashlight. And her purse. The first, though, would help find the second, so she searched on the dirt floor. The flashlight was light gray, which should have made it easier to find than the dark purse, but she spotted the bag first, lying in a heap not far from where she’d fallen. She took it and blinked hard, trying to see better. A little light seeped through the hole in the floor overhead. Very little, given that it was only moonlight shining through the library windows.

  Tess looked up at the hole…and saw the flashlight teetering on the edge.

  She took a deep breath. No matter. She could fix this.

  Tess felt around on the floor and picked up a chunk of fallen wood. She positioned herself under the hole and pitched the wood up at the flashlight. Her aim was perfect. The wood hit the flashlight…and knocked it backward out of sight.

  Tess responded with every swear word she knew. While she was certain Mrs. Hazelton would disagree, there seemed a time and a place for profanity. A purpose too. It certainly made her feel better.

  She squared her shoulders and marched forward…only to stumble over a piece of debris. All right then. Less confidence, more caution. She walked slowly, each foot sweeping the way before touching down. She kept her hands outstretched too, and after no more than five steps she felt concrete. A wall. See, that was easy. All she had to do was walk—carefully—along the wall until her fingers found the door.

  She was at the first corner when she heard scratching. She froze. Silence. She lifted a foot. Another scratch, long and deliberate. Then another. Tess’s mind fell back into that nightmare place, trapped in the box, oxygen almost gone, her fingers bloody and raw, the final slow scratches against the wooden—

  She shook herself hard. It was a rat. Maybe even just a mouse, but she would accept the possibility of rats. She’d helped Billy when a few got into the storage shed where his parents kept their flour. One swift kick had sent them scattering so Billy could lay out the traps. Rats, she’d realized, were much more frightening in fiction than in reality.

  She tilted her head and listened to the scratching. It came from the other side of the wall. Good enough. Forewarned was forearmed. Just find the door. Find the stairs. Get out.

  As she felt her way along the next wall, the scratching stopped. A sob echoed through the room. Every hair on Tess’s body shot up, and she strained to hear, telling herself she’d misheard, she must have misheard…

  Another sob, so clear now that it sounded as if it came from directly behind her. She wheeled, turning her back to the wall. A sniffle. Then crying. Quiet, muffled crying. From the very room where she stood.

  “H-hello?”

  No one replied. Did she expect an answer? Did she want one? No. For the first time in her life, she heard a voice in the dark and prayed it was her imagination. Her madness. Because the alternative…

  “Aidez-moi.” Help me.

  No. No, no, no…Tess rubbed her arms as hard as she could. Pain blazed when she touched her skinned elbow, but she didn’t care.

  “Aidez-moi,” the voice whispered. “S’il vous plaît.” Help me, please.

  Tess wasn’t alone down here, and if she wasn’t alone, then that meant…

  She thought of the branch covering the broken window. Of the flashlight stored there. Of the blanket and pop bottles inside. Of the smell of smoke from the fireplace, and the footprints, all from one set of shoes. It wasn’t a group of kids having a bonfire. It was one person.

  A man living above. A woman down here.

  Every lurid article from every lurid magazine that Tess wasn’t supposed to read flooded back to her now. Tales of women held hostage by crazed killers. Those stories always frightened her more than any monster novel, because monsters weren’t real. Not the ones with fur and fangs. Human monsters? They were real, and she’d only needed to read a couple of these stories to know they were not her idea of entertainment.

  Was it the man from the truck? Surely two men in the same village could not be kidnapping women. Somehow, in escaping him, she’d come straight to his lair. She had no idea how that was possible, but there seemed no other explanation.

  “Hello?” she said. Then, “Où êtes-vous?” Where are you? A silly thing to ask, but she did anyway.

  “Aidez-moi.”

  “I will. Just…say something else.” Tess started forward, her feet sweeping again. She repeated the words in French—or as near an approximation to them as she could manage.

  “Aidez-moi.”

  Tess followed the sound of the voice as she told the woman to keep talking.

  “Je suis désolée.” I am sorry.

  The voice came from near floor level, right in front of Tess. She crouched and reached out. The woman started crying again…behind her.

  Tess went still. “Où êtes-vous?”

  Soft crying answered…from her left now.

  “Je suis désolée. Je suis désolée. Je suis désolée.”

  Each time, the voice came from another direction. Tess rose, her eyes wide and heart pounding as she backed up until she hit the wall.

  “Aidez-moi, s’il vous plaît. Je suis désolée.” Help me, please. I am sorry.

  The words repeated from every corner of the room, getting louder each time, until Tess shrank, crouching, with her hands over her ears.

  “Not real. Not real. Not real.”

  The voice stopped. Tess straightened slowly, one hand clutching her purse strap as if she could use it as a weapon.

  A weapon against phantasms? Against her imagination? Against madness?

  She gritted her teeth and resumed her methodical circuit around the room. When the crying started again, her fingers shook, but she kept going. One wall, two walls,
three walls…four? She’d reached the fourth corner, which meant she’d gone all the way around and failed to find a door.

  That wasn’t possible. Simply wasn’t. Not all rooms were quadrilaterals. She kept going. Fifth wall. Sixth? Seventh? No, that couldn’t be. Then her foot struck the same board she’d encountered on the third wall, and she realized she was going around a second time.

  Four walls. No exit.

  Impossible. She moved more slowly now, her hands reaching down for cubbyholes and up for hatches. There would be something. There had to be.

  There was not.

  No door. No cubby. No hatch.

  “Aidez-moi, s’il vous plaît. Je suis désolée.”

  Tess clapped her hands over her ears. No doors? Fine. There was a hole in the ceiling, wasn’t there? And debris below. If she could pile it and climb—

  Footsteps sounded on the floor overhead. Slow, heavy footsteps.

  Nine

  TESS MOVED AWAY from the hole in the ceiling and huddled in the corner farthest from it as she listened to the footfalls.

  “Qui est là?” a voice said from above. Who’s here?

  A male voice. Not a child’s but not old enough to be the man in the truck.

  “Il y a quelqu’un?” Is someone there? Then a grunt, as if in disgust, the voice growing stronger now as he said in French, “I know someone’s here. You took my flashlight. Come out,” followed by something she couldn’t translate.

  The footsteps stopped. A clatter. The flashlight turned on. A curse then. Or she presumed from his tone that it was a curse, though such vocabulary had not been part of their French lessons.

  A thump. A dark figure appeared over the hole. He shone the light straight down at first, as if looking for a body. Then he moved it aside, and she saw a boy, her age or a little older. Straight dark hair fell around his face as he leaned over the edge of the hole. He wore a denim jacket, frayed at the collar and cuffs. In one hand he held the flashlight. In the other…

  He moved the beam, and it glinted off a switchblade. Tess shrank back and held her breath, but as soon as he shone that light around the small room…

  “Merde,” he muttered and eased back onto his haunches with a deep, aggrieved sigh. Then he leaned forward again and spoke rapid-fire French. It was clearly a question. When she didn’t reply, he said it again, and Tess decided that whatever the situation, cowering wasn’t going to help.

  She rose and brushed herself off. “Do you speak English?”

  “Not if I can help it.” His English was thickly accented but much better than her French, so she ignored the sentiment and said, “I fell.”

  “No kidding.” Another grunt, as aggrieved as his sigh, and he pushed to his feet. “Get out of there and find your own place for the night. This one’s mine.”

  “There’s no way out.”

  “Sure there is. It’s called a door.” He started walking away. Tess hurried over to the hole as he said, “Don’t ask for my flashlight either. If you need light…”

  He tossed something down. She caught a book of matches.

  “Just don’t burn the place down,” he said. “You’ve done enough damage.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “There’s no door.”

  A snort. Boots clomped as he returned to the hole and shone the light down. “It’s right—”

  The beam passed over four solid walls. Then it crossed them again, slower.

  “No door,” she said. “If you spot a secret hatch, though, I’ll be happy to take it.”

  She couldn’t see his face very well, given the angle and the shadows and the hair falling around it as he leaned down. But when he looked her way, she could see his eyes—gray-blue and narrowed, as if it was her own fault for falling into a doorless room.

  “How much to get you out?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “I thought you said you spoke English.”

  “I do. I—” She realized he was being sarcastic. “A dollar.”

  “Two.”

  “One-fifty.”

  “Throw it up.”

  Now it was her turn to snort. Which she did—and tossed up two quarters. “You’ll get the rest when I’m out. And only if you throw me the knife first.”

  “What?”

  “The knife. I’m not climbing up there while you’re holding a knife.”

  He scooped up the quarters. “Then I guess you aren’t climbing up here.”

  “Do you want the dollar?”

  “Do you want to be rescued?”

  “Rescued, yes. Mugged, no.”

  More eye narrowing. “Do I look like a mugger?”

  “You just demanded payment to rescue someone trapped in an abandoned basement.”

  “Payment for services rendered. Not theft.”

  Tess could argue that, considering her alternative seemed to be slow death by dehydration, it certainly felt like robbery. But she settled for saying, “Still, you can see where I’d be concerned, being rescued by someone with a knife who seems determined to turn a profit in the matter.”

  “And you can see where I’d be concerned, giving my knife to someone who obviously doesn’t think I deserve to turn a profit in the matter.”

  “You think I would—” She paused. “You have a point.”

  His brows lifted, as if surprised she’d admitted it. He hesitated, then drew back his hand—the one holding the knife. If he’d been a moment slower, she’d have ducked and probably yelped, but fortunately for her ego, he threw it before she realized what was happening. The knife shot to his left and landed with a thwack, embedded in the wall.

  “There,” he said. “Out of both our reaches.”

  “Thank you.”

  He grunted and walked away. To find something to haul her up with. Or so she hoped.

  Tess stood a reasonable distance from the hole and struggled to catch her breath. He’d located a rope, which sounded like the obvious way to pull someone out of a basement, but again, it hadn’t been as easy as it seemed in books. She’d climbed and he’d pulled—less than she climbed, she suspected—and now they were both recuperating from the operation.

  He was smaller than he’d seemed looming over that hole. Shorter anyway. Billy was five foot nine and lamenting his chances of reaching six feet. This boy was about the same age but a couple of inches shorter. He was slender and wiry—he’d pulled off his jean jacket for the rescue operation. When she’d first come up over the edge, she’d thought he was Native Canadian, with his straight black hair and light brown skin, but those gray-blue eyes suggested there was more. Métis was the word that sprang to mind, courtesy of a history teacher who’d been enamored of the Louis Riel story.

  Métis were originally the children of French trappers and Native women. Of course, the days of trapping were long past, but the Métis remained a distinct culture. Whether this boy was Métis or simply of mixed race was irrelevant though. Anything about him beyond the fact that he’d come by at a very good time was irrelevant.

  “Thank you,” she said, graciously she hoped, as she passed him a dollar bill.

  He grunted and pocketed it.

  “I’m Therese,” she said. “Tess.”

  He gave her a cool, level stare. “And I’m the guy who had to rescue you. Let’s leave it at that. The exit is over there.” He pointed at the broken window.

  “Can I ask you—”

  “No. Whatever it is, the answer is no. I’m tired, and this is my place. Go find your own.”

  “Can I just ask—”

  “Did I say no? Now unless you want to rent a room from me…”

  Her expression must have answered for her.

  He chuckled. “Thought so. Go away, little girl. You’ve caused enough trouble tonight.”

  He went to retrieve his knife, and Tess decided to do as he asked.

  Tess spent the night in the forest, as close to the house as possible. Given the alternatives, it seemed safest, which proved exactly how unsafe her life
had become since leaving Hope. She was exhausted enough that she barely had time to consider her surroundings before she dropped into as deep a sleep as if she’d been home in her bed.

  At dawn she was back in the house, sitting in the least smelly armchair, waiting for the boy to wake up. He finally opened one eye, spied her through a curtain of hair and jumped up, one hand brushing his hair back, the other fumbling for the knife that was, apparently, not where he’d left it. That’s when he finally recognized the intruder and started swearing in a creative mix of English and French and possibly a third language.

  “You left it over there.” She pointed at the blade by the fireplace. “You must have been as tired as I was last night.”

  “What part of go away wasn’t perfectly clear?”

  “I went away. Then I came back.” She hopped from the chair and walked over. “I have a proposal for you.”

  “A what?”

  “A job. I would like to hire you to—”

  He cut her off with a sputtered laugh. “And what makes you think I’m in the market for a job?”

  “You demanded money to rescue me last night.”

  “Maybe I just didn’t appreciate the inconvenience.”

  “You’re living in an abandoned house, which means you’re a runaway. Unless you’re eighteen, which makes you a vagrant instead.”

  His eyes narrowed. “A vagrant? Why would you say that?”

  “One look at you.”

  More narrowing. “Is that right? So you just presume, based on my looks, that I’m a vagrant.”

  “Yes. You need a shower. Desperately—”

  “What?” He seemed genuinely surprised. Apparently, he hadn’t seen a mirror in a while.

  “Shower. Water plus soap. Shampoo would be nice. Your T-shirt is dirty and your jeans look like they could stand up on their own.”

  He said nothing.

  “What?” she said. “If you don’t believe me, I’m sure there’s a mirror—”