by Laura Bickle
Pastor Cowan pushed his glasses up his nose. “Do you, Gabriel Manget, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
Gabe looked at her with his bottomless amber eyes. “I do.”
“Do you, Petra Barbara Dee, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
“I do.”
“Do you have the rings?”
“No rings,” Petra said. She hadn’t gotten that far along in this adventure.
“Then, by the power invested in me by the state of Wyoming, I pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”
She leaned forward on tiptoe to kiss him. This felt good. It felt right. He reached down to touch her face, and his was shining. He tucked the amaryllis flower behind her ear, and she grinned as he tried to negotiate the unwieldy stem into her hair. Her hand landed on his chest, and she could feel his human heart beating beneath her fingers.
A cell phone rang. Petra was dimly aware of it—the ringtone was CCR’s “Fortunate Son.” The pastor signed off on the marriage certificate, which was still warm from the laser printer, likely from the front desk.
“A gift for you,” her father said. He took her open palm and poured something into it with his palsied hands.
“Oh, Dad,” she said. “You didn’t need to—”
“Hush.”
She opened her hand. There were two marbles in her palm. One solid white and scuffed, the other clear with a gold cat’s-eye. They rolled in her hand like a sun and moon—they must have been treasures from her father’s bedside alchemy set, or something he’d found in the hall.
“Put one under your pillow tonight, and one under your husband’s,” he ordered, a twinkle in his eye.
Her brow wrinkled. “Okay, but what—”
“Oh, my God,” Maria said from across the room.
Petra turned to see Maria blanch and sit down heavily at the end of the bed.
“What’s wrong?”
Maria covered the receiver of her cell phone with her hand. “It’s Mike. It’s bad. I’ve got to get to the hospital.”
Chapter 8
In the Dark
Keeping control of the crime scene was more difficult than Owen anticipated.
He’d radioed a half dozen of his most discreet crime scene techs and deputies to come collect Sal’s body and cut the others out of the tree roots. They’d zipped Sal up in a body bag and taken a Sawzall to the roots, trying to keep the right body parts together by tagging them before putting them in bags. A generator had been hauled in by truck, and the sound drowned out much of the chatter. Orange electrical cords snaked down through the hatch to power steaming yellow lights. Photographs were taken. A fingerprint tech tried to take prints from the remaining surfaces and hands. A few squirts of Luminol suggested that the whole place had been doused in blood at some time or other. Owen watched in wonder, flickering around his men like a shadow. He’d tied a handkerchief smeared with Vicks over his face, but he quickly forgot the smell.
He formed many impressions in those hours—that this thing, this tree, had been here for a very long time. The bodies—not so long. Winter could slow decomposition, but these were reasonably fresh, in corpse-time. Probably not more than a few months.
And this chamber . . . he could not tell if it was man-made or natural. A tunnel split away from it, and Owen placed yellow crime-scene tape over the opening.
“We should look down there for more bodies,” one of his men suggested.
“No.” Owen knew that he had to get the bodies out of there, but he felt curiously protective about the rest of the site. He had the sense of standing in the center of a great hive of inexplicable things, and he didn’t want to share them with anyone. Not yet.
“But there might be more evidence . . .”
“I said no.”
“All right, then.”
But he knew people would gossip, that word would get around the department and beyond about the weird mass murder scene. No matter how much Owen reminded his people of the confidentiality of ongoing investigations, there were no secrets that were kept long here.
When the last truck had moved away across the snow to the morgue, full of body bags, Owen remained beside the burned tree. What was this? What had it meant? What had Sal and the others died for?
He turned the heater on in his SUV and fished his cell phone out of his belt. Then he did what any wise man would do in inexplicable circumstances: He thumbed through his contact list and dialed his mother.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Owen. How are you?”
“I wanted you to know before you heard it anyplace else. We found Sal.”
There was a silence at the end of the line for a few moments, and then he heard his mother sigh. “Is he alive?”
His mother was not the kind of woman for whom one needed to sugar-coat things. She was steel coated in Dior, and she would lose little sleep over Sal’s demise. She’d have a glass of sherry and order a flower arrangement for the funeral.
“No. We found his body at the ranch. Under a tree, of all places.”
“Owen. Be careful.”
He played with the heater now that it had begun to warm up, cranking it full blast. “Do you know what’s going on here? Did Dad?”
“Your father . . . when he was alive, talked in his sleep. He talked about dead men walking, about the Tree of Life. About magic.”
“What did he mean?”
“He didn’t like to talk about it when he was awake. And your father’s story is not my story to tell. I just knew there was something . . . off about that place. And to tell the truth, I was glad that Sal inherited it, and not you. Nothing good ever comes from there. Just . . . just leave it alone, Owen. If you’re smart, you’ll sell it the instant it gets out of probate and wash your hands of it.”
“I can’t promise that, Mom.”
She sighed again, and the sound rattled across the receiver. He heard the clink of porcelain teacups in the background. “Shall I go ahead and call Doug Harrington? Harrington’s did a nice job with your father’s funeral.”
“Yeah.” Owen rubbed his forehead. Harrington’s was the best funeral home in town. There was really only one place to send Sal, and that was to hell in a velvet-lined coffin.
“Open casket or closed?” his mother asked. He heard her shuffling with what he assumed was a phone book and the scratch of a pencil on paper as she cradled the receiver on her shoulder.
“Closed. Definitely closed.”
“Well, that’ll be less expensive. Do you know when Doug and his boys can come pick up the body?”
“Not for a few days. The coroner will have to do an autopsy. But when she’s done, they can get the body from there.”
“Okay. When that happens, I’ll run an announcement in the paper. I’ll ask Doug what kind of flowers they can get . . . probably amaryllises, this time of year. And when you get a chance, get a suit of clothes from Sal’s closet. Socks, shoes. The whole nine yards.”
“Gotcha.”
“Don’t bury him with your grandfather’s ring. That belongs to you.” His mom was not given to sentimentality. She was all business. He only remembered seeing her cry once, when deputies had showed up on their doorstep to tell her that his father died. She had waited until they left before she broke down in tears. He admired that about her. Admired it, and feared it just a little bit, if he admitted it to himself. She was a tough lady. Had to be.
“Yeah.” He stared down at his right hand, which now bore Sal’s ring. He’d taken it off the corpse before they’d zipped it up, in a twinge of spite. It had been a little sticky, but he’d rubbed the residue off on his sleeve. Good as new.
He hung up when he could feel his toes again and when he heard his mother’s teakettle whistling in the background.
This place. He let his eyes rove the desolation.
There was something here, he was sure of it. And he was sure he wasn’t getting the whole story from his mother.
Anna sat on the p
assenger seat of his SUV. “Are you going back down there?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like it underground.” She chewed on the tie of her hood.
“You don’t have to come.”
He turned off the engine to the truck, locked up, and let himself back down the hatch, into the empty chamber that now smelled of fresh sawdust and chalk. He turned on his flashlight and stood before the tunnel that he’d taped off, pulled a corner of the tape down, and stepped through.
He rummaged around in his coat pocket for a piece of crime-scene chalk to mark an arrow on the tunnel wall. He had no idea where these tunnels went, but he sure as fuck didn’t want to get lost in here and freeze to death.
Pulling his collar up around his ears, he began to explore. Some of the tunnel structure was round, and rough-hewn, while other sections were square with supporting beams chewed by termites and stained with wood rot. Water had sunk in here, bits of melting ice shining overhead and treacherous slicks formed on the floor. Owen estimated that the temperature here was warmer than above ground, about fifty-five degrees. The ice was melting and slushy as it filtered through the ground, and he was glad that he’d worn his waterproof boots today. All hail the mighty Gore-Tex.
He turned left and right, marking his choices on the walls. The tunnels seemed to slope down, down. He figured he’d walked more than a couple of miles. He reached for the compass application on his cell phone to show him what direction he was walking, but there was no signal here.
He heard something up ahead, something that sounded like running water.
The tunnel banked sharply to the right and went down in a series of stone steps. They were oddly worn, as if they’d been trod on by many feet. Owen minded his footing, shining his light ahead of him, and the beam bounced off water.
Not just water—a river. The steps descended to the gravel-strewn bank of a river that ran down a passageway larger than a train tunnel. The river was easily thirty feet wide, the current moving lazily to his right. A thick grey mist clung to the surface of the water, soaking deep into the damp stone walls.
“What the hell,” he muttered. He knew of no aquifers here on the ranch. Just little above ground streams that dried out in summer and bloated with rain in the spring.
He felt something dripping into his face, a spatter that rattled against his hat. He swept his beam up. A grey cloud was clinging up to the vast ceiling, and it was raining. Raining in an underground tunnel.
“This can’t be happening,” he said to himself. All he knew about meteorology he’d learned from the people in windbreakers on the Weather Channel. But he was pretty sure that this just didn’t happen.
“Well, it is.” Anna had appeared beside him, looking cold. She’d pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down to cover her fingertips and wrapped her hands around her elbows. He didn’t know if ghosts even got cold, or if this was just some residual habit left over from her life. But she sure was convincing.
“I thought you were staying topside.”
She shrugged. “What’s this place going to do? Kill me?” She walked to the edge of the river and peered down.
Owen took this as an opportunity to gently poke at her. “Does this place bring up any memories?”
“Memories of what happened at the well?”
“Yeah.”
“I told you that I can’t remember who did it.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
She lifted her head and rain speckled her face. “It did rain while I was down there. It felt a lot like this. Grey overhead.”
“Were you alive for that?” Owen’s heart pounded. The coroner had never been able to say definitively if she’d been alive or not when she’d been dropped into the well.
She closed her eyes. “I remember that I had a sunburn, and that the rain felt awfully good.”
That sounded really corporeal, as if she’d been alive. Owen waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. Instead, she stuck her finger out over the riverbank, into the darkness. “Do you see that?”
Owen shone his light where she pointed. Apparently, ghosts could see in the dark. His light picked out something pale and gleaming on the shore. As he stepped toward it, he saw that it was a bone—more than one.
“Shit.” Owen had had enough of bodies today. A collection of bones stretched along the river silt, worn clean by water. He tugged one piece free of the mud, and lifted it to inspect it.
It was a long, light bone, attached to another, with a spine of finer bones splaying out from it. It looked like a bird wing, held together with a lacing of desiccated leathery tendons. But birds didn’t grow that big. He tugged at it, and a socket popped free of the mud, sending the assembly clattering away like the sail of a kayak.
“What is that?” Anna asked.
“I don’t know.” He dropped it and took two more steps. There was another set of bones here—a skull. He worked it free of the mud with his boot. It looked like nothing he’d ever seen: a flat skull with a raised ridge that ran from snout to crown. It had a double row of teeth, like a shark.
“Jesus.” He dropped it, plucked his hat off his head, and rubbed his suddenly sweaty forehead. “What is this place?”
Anna hovered motionless beside the river, staring at the mist. Owen was going to ask her to stand back—who the hell knew, there could be sea monsters in there—but he had to remind himself that she was dead. He stepped up beside her. “Look, I think we ought to—”
He spun his light into the mist, following her gaze. “Oh.”
“That’s what it looked like. From the bottom of the well,” she whispered.
The mist swirled around a full-moon circle of light. Birds flew across the circle. Clouds scudded past, and the sun set. A moon rose jerkily, studded with bats, and stars spun around.
Owen’s brow wrinkled. “That’s what you saw?”
“Yes.”
The moon and sun swung past at a dizzying pace. Owen guessed that months were passing in fast-forward before his eyes, maybe even as many as six or seven months—and then the sun eventually moved away from the mouth of the well.
“The screaming stopped after a week or two,” she supplied, with what sounded like the intent to be soothing.
A shadow stopped over the well, leaning in.
And then a ripple formed in the surface of the water, shattering the image.
“Who was that?”
Anna looked away, shaking her head. Blond hair lashed against her cheek. “I don’t remember.”
“Try.”
“I can’t.”
He reached out for her hand, but his fingers passed through her. He kept forgetting.
“How did you do that?”
“I didn’t do that. It was the river.”
Owen turned back to the water and squinted into it. It seemed as if something moved underneath the fog and the opaque surface. He stepped closer to the edge, peered in.
Ravens flew across a bright white sky. Ravens. It now occurred to him that there had always been hundreds of them at the ranch, but he hadn’t seen a solitary one since Sal died.
The ravens swept over a field, the field at the base of the burned tree. They began pecking at Sal’s prone form, pulling the flesh from his bones. Sal didn’t move or flinch, not even when one of them waddled off with his finger.
What did this mean? Ravens couldn’t kill Sal. Someone—or something—had done that.
The image misted over and vanished, replaced by ripples of water.
Owen realized with cold shock that he’d waded into the river up to his knees. Anna floated beside him, her sneakered foot barely skimming the surface of the water. His light lanced into the water, at the pebbles beneath.
And something glittered back at him.
He squinted hard and plunged his hand into the shockingly cold water, fishing around in the silt. It came back with a stone about the size of a gum ball, shining in the diffuse light.
“What is it?” Anna asked.
Owen stared at it in wonder. It was perfectly round, with a nacre sheen. “Damn. I think . . . I think this is a pearl.” He jammed it into his pocket and swept his flashlight down to look for more . . .
. . . when something lunged out of the dark water at him. Something dark and massive that roared at him as it latched onto his sleeve with teeth. He stumbled backward, splashing in the water, while Anna screamed.
His flashlight dropped in the water and went out. Owen scrabbled in his gun belt for his gun and fired blindly into the darkness. The thing roared again, with an almost musical voice, and let him go with a wet smack into the gravel. He scrambled up the bank and found himself pressed to the cold stone wall, inching along it, trying to find the mouth of the tunnel. He’d become completely disoriented in the total blackness, his heart hammering in his chest. All he could perceive was the cold and the rustle of the water, and he had no idea what stirred within it. He heard a distant humming, like a woman trying to remember a tune.
“Anna,” he whispered. “Anna, help me.”
“This way.” Her voice emanated from his left, and he followed it, stumbling, until he plunged into a flight of steps on his hands and knees. He climbed up them on all fours, and it felt like he was in the smaller space of the tunnel, the river behind him. His ragged breath echoed all around him.
“Come on,” she said.
With his arms out in front of him, Owen staggered into the black. “Anna?”
“I’m here. Just keep following me.”
She began to sing, a little off-key. She sang some Katy Perry songs that Owen recognized and others he didn’t. He was just grateful to have something to fill this interminable darkness. He wondered if this was what sensory deprivation tanks felt like. He could understand how this would drive a man mad within an hour. Owen was pretty sure that he was already entirely mad, and that it didn’t matter. He just hoped that the thing—whatever it was—wasn’t following him.
He bounced off slimy walls, slipped in a puddle and cracked his tailbone on the floor.