Haunted Echoes

by Cindy Dees

  Rhys and Catrina walked us over to one of the outbuildings behind the main house, and the two of them wrestled open a squeaky garage door on rollers. Inside was a tiny, aging Citroën Saxo.

  Rhys dug a set of keys out of his pocket and handed them to Robert. “It’s not much to look at, but it’ll get you there and back.” He added with a grin, “And I think it’ll hold all that gear.”

  It did, indeed, take all our equipment in the backseat. Barely. We climbed in and, armed with Rhys’s map, set out. The little Saxo was a gutless wonder that labored up every steep hill. But it was better than walking. And it proved sturdier on the horrendously bad dirt roads the map took us over than I’d have expected. We had to stop once at a farmhouse to ask directions, but the farmer knew right where the caves were and gave us exact directions to go the rest of the way.

  We parked at the base of the mountain where he’d told us to and looked up in trepidation. The farmer said all we had to do was walk about halfway up the hill and we’d see the main opening beside a cluster of three big boulders.

  The guy’s “hill” was practically a cliff—it was navigable with hands and feet, but that was about all that distinguished it from an unscalable rock face. And the entire mountain was littered with huge boulders as if the gals had thrown them here just to get in the way. There was no help for it. We were going to have to climb that monster.

  The worst of it turned out to be hauling our gear up the mountain. It caught on something with practically every step we took. And once we got onto the mountain, it was hard to gauge what constituted halfway up. The floor of the valley looked as if it were a mile below us in a matter of minutes. Our other problem was that Robert was an incredibly agile climber—part of his thief training, apparently—and I was, well, not.

  Eventually, he took my pile of gear from me entirely, and that evened us out quite a bit. He slowed down, and I didn’t have to call out for him to stop and wait for me nearly so often. We kept having to go around rock outcroppings, and all the sideways traversing disoriented me. Fortunately, Robert didn’t seem so afflicted.

  Finally, Robert announced, panting, “This is about halfway up the hill. Now, we just have to look around for a cluster of three boulders.”

  Although it was strenuous scrambling across the face of the hill, it was nowhere near as bad as going straight up. We traversed the hill twice, edging higher each time in search of this supposed cave entrance. I’d begun to wonder if the farmer had played a colossal and rotten joke on us when suddenly I spotted a distinctive cluster of rocks. They sat alone in a little grassy area with no other rocks around them. Each stone was about my height and maybe ten feet wide. And they nestled together in a precise triangle set into the hillside.

  “I think I found it!” I called out to Robert. He joined me, and we approached the boulders together. We stepped around to the right side of the stones, and there it was. Between the right-hand boulder and the face of the hill. A good-sized opening, maybe eight feet tall and twice that wide, stretching almost all the way across the back of the three boulders. We stepped into the entrance and immediately noticed white gouge marks in the floor. As wide as my hand and maybe four feet long, they were definitely man-made and definitely fresh. It looked like something incredibly heavy had been dragged across the stone.

  We walked twenty or thirty feet into the cave before we had to turn on our flashlights. We donned the miner’s hard hats Rhys had given us and turned on their lamps.

  “This looks like an old mining tunnel,” Robert commented.

  It did, indeed. The walls were rectangular and bumpy, like a pickax had been used to chip them out of the mountain. Mother Nature hadn’t carved this tunnel.

  I took off my glove and ran my hand over the surface of one wall. “This is very old. The rough edges have all worn away.”

  Robert pointed up at a rusty fixture up near the ceiling. “At some point this place had electric lights.” He shined a flashlight up toward the old socket and said suddenly, “Have a look at that!”

  I turned my own headlamp up where he pointed and gasped. A very much intact electrical wire ran along the intersection of the wall and ceiling. It was a heavy-duty affair the thickness of my wrist and wrapped in black rubber insulation. Why in the world would somebody run wiring of that scale down into this cave? And recently, to boot.

  More cautiously, we moved forward. I don’t know how long we walked. I didn’t stop to dig under my glove and sleeve to get at my watch. The tunnel proceeded mostly downhill on a very gentle grade. We passed through a few natural chambers, and the hefty wire ran around the edges of them and resumed its course down a tunnel each time.

  There was no question but that we would follow that wire wherever it took us. Side passages branched off at regular intervals as if this had, indeed, been a mining operation of some kind.

  And then we heard a noise.

  Not a big one. But definitely not a sound we’d made. Robert and I froze, turning off our headlamps simultaneously. We stood there in the dark for a long time, just listening. All I heard was an occasional drip. But the sound I’d heard was more like two stones striking one another.

  “Let’s use as little light as possible,” Robert breathed.

  Oh, great. Been there done that in the catacombs, and it sucked. And those had been nice smooth tunnels with perfectly even floors. Robert turned on a single penlight and put his finger over the end of it. We gave our eyes a few minutes to adjust to the extremely dim illumination, and we eased forward again.

  We heard another sound. And this time, it was definitely coming from well in front of us. Someone was already down here! Robert turned off the lone flashlight—and it wasn’t totally pitch-dark! The very faintest of light came from somewhere ahead of us. You have to understand. We’re talking degrees of blackness, here. But nonetheless, there was a light source ahead of us.

  Robert glided forward one step at a time, pausing between each footstep to listen. This patience must have been part of why he was a successful art thief. Me, I was going insane with the suspense.

  That’s not why I stumbled when I did, though. Nothing so deep and psychological as that. My foot merely hit a wet spot and slipped when I tried to put my weight down on it. The climbing cleats scraped across the stone until they caught a protrusion and my sliding momentum came to an abrupt and overbalancing halt. Which is to say, I nearly fell on my face and was only stopped from doing so by crashing into the wall.

  My metal canteen clanked against my flashlight, and that slammed into a loose stone, causing a cascade of scree to break off the wall and clatter to the floor. All in all, I made a big, damn noise that no idiot could possibly miss.

  Sure enough, the faint glow ahead of us was extinguished immediately.

  And seconds later, we heard the sound of running footsteps. Coming right at us. Fast.

  “Run,” Robert bit out. I turned around and, fumbling for my flashlight, headed back up the tunnel. I got my flashlight on and put on a burst of speed, scrambling over the rough floor like a mountain goat with a cougar on its heels.

  We kept having to stop at every intersection to check which direction the overhead cable went, and each time we did, I could swear the pounding footsteps behind us got a little closer. Fear gave my feet wings, but there’s only so much adrenaline can do for a person.

  “Faster, sweetheart,” Robert urged me when I began to tire.

  We arrived at the first big natural chamber, and I lost sight of the electrical cable. We had to stop and backtrack to the tunnel we’d come out of and follow it around the perimeter again to the correct tunnel. The footsteps—for we could distinguish at least two sets of feet now—sounded really close when we finally got our bearings again.

  “You go on ahead,” Robert murmured. “I’ll stay behind and slow them down a little.”

  “No!” I exclaimed under my breath.

  “They know the way and we don’t. We’ll never beat them out of here. Go. If nothing else, go get
help.” He pressed the car keys into my hand.

  I knew that stubborn set to his jaw. I wasn’t going to talk him out of this heroic foolishness. And so, despite my terrible misgivings, I ran.

  I didn’t get more than a hundred feet or so beyond the big room when I heard shouting behind me. I couldn’t help it. I slowed down. I heard Robert’s voice taunting the men. The echoes were distorted so I couldn’t make out words, but the tone of voice was unmistakable.

  And so was the smack of fists on flesh. Oh, God. They’d attacked Robert.

  No matter what he said, my feet weren’t taking me one step closer to the exit and safety. I had to go back.

  Now, I wasn’t a complete idiot. I kept my wits about me and did two things. I turned off my flashlight and pulled out the pickax. It wasn’t huge, but it would pack a mean punch if it connected with someone’s head.

  My heart racing and my breath coming short and fast, I eased back down the tunnel. And I prayed I wouldn’t make any more boneheaded stumbles. Robert’s life might depend on it.

  A glow lit the mouth of the tunnel ahead. I crept toward it, crouching low. Very carefully, I peered around the corner and into the big room. Three men had Robert. Two were holding him by the arms, and struggling to do so, I might add. And the third man was punching the lights out of the man I loved. It was all I could do not to charge in there, roaring like the mother bear Robert had once compared me to. But that wouldn’t do any good. I couldn’t overpower them.

  And then I looked more closely. No surprise, I recognized one of the men. He was one of the Italian guys who’d jumped me in the park in Paris.

  Robert’s struggles subsided, and thankfully, the beating stopped. The guy using Robert as a punching bag growled something in Italian to the other men, and they turned and dragged Robert back the way they’d come. Robert made a lot of noise, dragging his feet and stumbling a lot. I don’t know if that was because he really had been knocked for a loop or because he suspected I might come back for him and need the cover of noise.

  Either way, I proceeded cautiously down the tunnel well behind the foursome.

  We passed the spot where I’d stumbled earlier and headed toward the glow, which became stronger and stronger as we approached it. I saw Robert briefly silhouetted in the mouth of the tunnel, sagging between the Italians. My stomach felt full of needles at seeing him hurt and in pain like that.

  And then they disappeared from sight. Exclamations in Italian greeted Robert’s appearance. I listened closely, and it sounded to me as if there were now four men in there with Robert. But I wasn’t sure. Not that it mattered. I couldn’t take on four big, strong men by myself.

  I took another careful step forward. And another.

  Something warm and smooth clamped over my mouth and I leaped straight up into the air. I struggled madly, trying to swing my pickax in the close confines of the tunnel. But my attacker clung to my back like a burr and I couldn’t shake him off.

  Or rather her. A voice whispered in my ear. “It’s Ginny. I’m here to help.”

  Ginny? The cat burglar type from Rome? What in the world was she doing here? How did she find us? Or was she part of the Italian team ahead?

  She breathed in my ear again, “We need to rescue Robert before they kill him. Will you let me help you?”

  I nodded under her gloved hand. She released me, and then I felt a tug on my sleeve. Back the other way. I didn’t want to go outside! I wanted to charge in that room and get my man back!

  When I refused to budge, the mouth touched my ear again and whispered a touch impatiently, “There’s another way in. Follow me.”

  Well, okay then. I reached out in the dark and grabbed her jacket. Carefully, I memorized the turns she took in case she was leading me on some kind of wild-goose chase to distract me while her cohorts did away with Robert. Where had she come from, anyway?

  There were no cars at the base of the hill, no sign of people having climbed the hill to get to the cave. I was going to be very annoyed if there was another way into this cave complex that didn’t involve making like a mountain goat.

  Finally, Ginny stopped and turned on a flashlight. She crouched in the tunnel. Using her finger, she drew a rough map in the dust. “Robert’s here. We’ve come around in a half circle like this. If my navigation is correct, all we need to do is turn left at the next tunnel, and it should lead us into the chamber where they’ve got Robert.”

  But we’d be coming into it from the opposite side. Maybe, just maybe that would give us some sort of tactical advantage over Robert’s attackers.

  “How are you in hand-to-hand combat?” Ginny asked.

  “Not bad, but not great. I can hold my own. I’ve had some training.”

  Her mouth curved up sardonically, “Not to mention that desperation makes a woman mean.”

  I nodded grimly. “And there is that.”

  “Let’s go have a look at the layout. Then, we’ll back up here and form a plan. Okay?”

  “Got it.”

  We snuck around the corner and up a short tunnel, and sure enough it ended in a relatively well-lit chamber. Crouching in the entrance, I peered out into the room. And stared in disbelief. There, in front of me was a crude machine the size of a step van. And mounted on one side of it was a device that could only be described as looking like a giant ray gun. It pointed down toward the floor in the far corner of the chamber, where a large pool of water lay, still and glasslike. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was some sort of doomsday machine.

  And given the crackling and popping sounds it was making, it was clear the thing was powering up.

  Chapter 19

  I may be an art historian, but my dad happens to be an electrical engineer. And like it or not, I grew up around circuit boards and home-built radios and all manner of electrical gadgets. The machine in front of me was very simple. Even my rudimentary knowledge of electronics was sufficient for me to know what I was looking at. An engine about the size of a car looked to be acting as a generator, feeding electricity to a giant capacitor.

  A capacitor stores up an electrical charge on some sort of surface—like the parallel array of a dozen or more giant metal plates in front of me, all of which were connected by heavy wires to the back end of the ray gun. The plates had to be ten feet across and at least that tall, separated by layers of what looked like plastic foam or something similar. When the insulating agent is removed rapidly from between its charged surfaces, the capacitor releases its stored energy in one giant surge of power. Almost like a lightning bolt.

  In this case, it looked for all the world like that bolt of electricity was going to be directed through the ray gun and toward that pond in the corner. Water is, of course, an outstanding conductor of electricity. That would be why electric razors and bathtubs don’t mix, for example. That pond seemed a strange target, indeed, for a machine of this magnitude. What could possibly be so important about it?

  I had no idea.

  And more to the point, I had no time to consider the question. I caught a glimpse of Robert kneeling on the floor, his fingers laced behind his head. One of the Italians had a pistol pointed at him. But as Robert didn’t seem to be putting up any sort of fight at the moment, the gun-toting guard looked fairly casual. He definitely didn’t look to be on the verge of executing Robert. Even better, his back was to me.

  The other Italians were clustered around the engine end of their gizmo. They all seemed to be looking at a gauge of some kind and then down at their watches. I caught enough of their conversation to decipher that they were trying to figure out how long it was going to take the weapon to charge. Their estimates ranged from three to ten minutes.

  That thing was a weapon?

  It was sure going to kill that pond deader than dead. There had to be enough juice stacking up in that thing to knock out a small city…or a very large power grid.

  Of course. My brain finally kicked back into gear in spite of the panic hovering far too close to the surface of my
thoughts. These guys would store up a massive amount of electricity and then shoot it into the ley lines as a single electromagnetic pulse. That pond must mark the spot where a bunch of the ley lines came together. And now that I looked again, I made out decrepit carving on the far side of the pond. A rough bowl was carved right into the stone wall beside a large, flat, tablelike rock. Yup, an ancient altar to mark a site of great mystical power. Just like Rhys had described.

  And like I already said, water was a tremendous conductor. What better way to send a huge surge of electricity down all the ley lines at once? Zap the whole darned pond!

  I had to stop that machine. After I rescued Robert.

  Ginny—I’d almost forgotten about her—tugged at my sleeve and gestured for me to back up. Reluctantly I followed her back down the tunnel.

  “Don’t ask me how, but I know the guy with the gun on Robert,” she breathed. “He’s big and strong, but not particularly trained in combat. He relies mostly on being intimidating.”

  He intimidated me. I thought fast. “Do you know him well enough to walk in there and start up a conversation with him?”

  Ginny looked startled. If she was a thief, she was probably used to thinking in terms of being invisible and working on the sly, not marching in brazenly and announcing herself. But desperate times call for desperate measures. Simply overpowering four men was out of the question. Therefore, we’d have to knock them mentally off balance. Having an attractive woman one of them knew stroll in out of the blue and start chatting should throw them all for a serious loop.

  Ginny nodded slowly. “I could tell them I’ve been asked to come here and check up on their progress. It’s flimsy, but it might be just unexpected enough that they’d buy it.”