Burden Falls

by Kat Ellis

  Dominic hisses out a breath. “Jesus. That’s a strong hallucinogenic.”

  “No shit. I’ve been seeing all kinds of weird things the last couple weeks, and I have no idea how much of it was real.”

  “But is it affecting you now?”

  I straighten up, assess. “I don’t think so. Carolyn said she put a megadose in my coffee tonight, but I only had a tiny sip. It tasted disgusting, so I thought it’d gone bad. I actually felt guilty for wasting it.” I laugh, but it sounds strained. “Let’s get on with this.”

  Before I can start to hyperventilate again, I climb into the water pipe.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Dominic passes me his phone to use as a flashlight, and I hold it between my teeth so I can keep my hands free. My breathing is loud in my own ears. It bounces along the brick tunnel ahead of me like it’s dancing with the light from the phone.

  So far, I haven’t seen any rats. Or snakes. Or ghosts. One spider, but it was long dead. Its husk had gone glassy and dried up with age. I hope that doesn’t happen to us.

  I hope that didn’t happen to Sadie, either.

  Damn it. Why didn’t it occur to me that maybe—just maybe—the reason Sadie disappeared was because she got stuck in this goddamn pipe? What if she died in here? Are we about to crawl across a hundred-year-old skeleton? Then I see it: There’s something up ahead and it’s moving. A spider, maybe, except it’s too big. Still, it moves like one. Legs hinged back, it crawls along the roof of the tunnel. I take the phone from my mouth, angling the light toward it.

  “Dominic,” I whisper, not wanting to draw its attention, but my voice is lost in the rasp of my dry throat. Because the not-spider is huge. Like, person-sized. And it’s still skittering in our direction, a vague black shape beyond the reach of my flashlight.

  Dominic bumps me from behind, and I almost drop the phone. The light jitters around the inside of the pipe, filling the shadows that just a moment ago housed an enormous spider-thing.

  “Are you okay?” Dominic asks, voice muffled by my own ass.

  “I think . . .” I shake my head, trying to clear the fuzzy waves that have started to appear at the edge of my vision. “Yeah, I think that PCP might be having an effect on me after all.”

  “You’re okay. I’m with you. Just keep going,” Dominic says from behind me. No matter what else is freaking me out right now, I’m glad he’s here with me. More for my benefit than his, of course, but I’m still glad.

  “Keep going,” I repeat. The pipe mutters back to me. But, in my head, the shuffling sound of our hands and knees in the old dirt dredges up another chant from my memory.

  We all have to crawl . . .

  We all have to crawl.

  WE ALL HAVE TO CRAWL.

  Something brushes against my cheek, and I scream. The phone clatters onto the dirt in front of me.

  We’re plunged into darkness.

  No!

  “What is it? What happened?” Dominic calls from behind me.

  I scrabble around for the phone. As soon as I find it and pick it up, the light returns. It was lying with the light facing down, that’s all. I let out a whimper of relief.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Something touched my face, but I think it was just my hair.”

  I dust off the phone before putting it back in my mouth, and we continue.

  Then a snicker sounds up ahead. Although the flashlight doesn’t reach far, I can’t see anyone, or anything, rushing to meet us. I can’t see much at all.

  Oh God, what’s up there?

  I have no idea how far we’ve crawled, or whether we might still be close to the pit, or nearer to wherever the pipe leads. But we can’t go back. There’s no way to turn around, and we can’t crawl back into a fire. So I keep moving forward. Faster, faster. Crusted dirt and brick scrape my hands and knees, but I don’t care. I keep moving, ignoring the way my breaths echo back to me. Ignoring the snickers bouncing from up ahead of us. I don’t want to know what I’m hurrying toward, not really. I just want to get out. We have to keep crawling. Have to crawl.

  We all have to crawl . . .

  “Fuu-huu-huuuck,” I groan, phone still jammed between my teeth. I have spit and tears running down my chin, but there’s not a lot I can do about it. I just have to keep going. I have to keep—

  The pipe ends directly in front of me.

  I’m facing a wall of earth.

  There’s no rhyme nor reason to it, it just . . . ends. I take the phone from my mouth.

  “What’s going on?” Dominic says behind me. “Are you stuck?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say, trying my best to sound calm, even though we both know that’s a lie. I prod the wall in front of me, just to check I’m not hallucinating it. “Maybe the pipe collapsed. It might be what blocked off the flow of water to the pit.”

  The earth feels damp against my fingers, like clay. I press against it, and a lump falls onto the floor of the pipe in front of me.

  “Maybe I can dig through it. It could lead to a way out.”

  Or it could unleash a torrent of water from the river, and we’ll drown stuck in this pipe. I’m pretty sure the same thought occurs to Dominic, because he says nothing.

  Damn it.

  I’m just going to have to hope that whatever water channel was feeding this pipe has now dried up. Digging my fingers into the mud wall ahead of me, I begin to claw out goopy handfuls. I push deeper, testing to see how thick the wall is.

  A trickle of water sluices out toward me.

  “Keep going,” Dominic says.

  I dig. The floor of the pipe in front of me is filling with clay and water and I still can’t dig it out fast enough. It’s pouring in now, and I start using my forearms, dragging armfuls of wet mud toward us. Finally, a big lump of the blockage falls away from me, leaving a gaping black hole.

  No more water rushes in. But I hear it—the roar of the river somewhere nearby. It vibrates along the pipe, a sound of unstoppable rage. I let it fill me as I shove, one hand, then the other, forcing more of the clay outward, making the hole bigger. I throw my weight into it. Too late, I have the awful thought that maybe it comes out somewhere on the sheer cliff face near the waterfall—out onto a deadly drop. But it’s not loud enough for that, only a thrum, really. Anyway, we can’t go back now.

  Taking the phone from my mouth, I shine it around the dark space. The light bounces off a circle of water just below the pipe. Above it, the walls are circular and made from stone, just like the walls of the pit, only the space is narrower—maybe five feet across. It smells dank and old, like something that’s gone beyond the point of rot.

  “It’s another well,” I say out loud, my voice dulled by the dark water next to me. This must have been the original source of water for the house before the pipe was added to connect it to the pit. I trace the path of the pipe in my mind, try to guess where this well sits on the property.

  The orchard?

  No, not quite—the pavilion.

  “This must’ve been under it the whole time,” I mutter.

  Did Sadie make it to this point, I wonder. Is she still here, hidden in that darkness?

  Yes.

  It might be the drug in my system, but I have the strongest sense that she’s down there. Her bones sunk deep at the bottom, buried by decades of dirt in that silent blackness. How deep is it, I wonder. If something dragged you down into the water, would you drown before you hit the bottom?

  “Are you able to climb out?” Dominic calls from behind me. His voice sounds odd. Worn out. It snaps me out of my weird daydream.

  Shining the light upward, I find a boarded ceiling maybe six or seven feet above my head. Wood—not stone. I check the phone for a signal, but it’s still a bust. Practically growling in frustration, I set it down so I can use my hands.

  “How hard can it be to John Wick my
way out of a well?”

  Using gaps between the stones in the walls as handholds, I maneuver so I’m standing with my feet at the edge of the pipe. From here, I can reach up and touch the wooden ceiling, but only just. If I lose my balance, I’ll plunge into the water in front of me.

  My fingertips dig into the rough stone walls as my head swims. It feels like something down there is pulling me forward, willing me to slip. I close my eyes. Think John Wick thoughts.

  Something reaches up from the water and wraps around my ankle.

  “It’s not real,” I whisper. But I can feel it. Hear the water dripping from long-dead bones. Imagine the slime sluicing out of those vacant eye sockets.

  I look down.

  The dead water is still.

  I take a deep, shuddering breath and look up again, feeling a little steadier. So I reach toward the ceiling, pressing against it with my fingertips. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t move.

  “I think I’m gonna need to borrow your height advantage,” I call down to Dominic, expecting to see him hauling his rangy frame from the pipe, but there’s no sign of him. “Nic?”

  Nothing.

  It’s a difficult maneuver to crouch down so I can peer back into the pipe, but I finally manage it.

  “Nic!”

  He’s lying facedown in the dirt lining the water pipe, one hand reaching toward me. For a moment, it sends me back to the day I found Freya, her pale hands resting in her lap, but I blink the image away. Dominic isn’t dead. He can’t be.

  “Nic!” I grab his wrist and shake him. He doesn’t wake up, but his head rolls to one side. Dominic’s lips are parted slightly, and as I wait, frozen, for him to move I see a puff of dust blowing up as he exhales.

  Not dead, thank God.

  Not doing great, though. That crowbar to the head might’ve done more damage than either of us realized.

  I bite my lip to keep from crying while I figure out what to do. Beyond Dominic is total darkness, but I know where it leads, and I think I could crawl over him if I have to. But there’s no way I could abandon him here alone in the dark, so I’d have to leave his phone with him.

  If I made it back to the pit and somehow got out of the blazing house, would I have a chance to tell someone where Dominic is before Uncle Ty or Carolyn could catch me? Or would I be leaving Nic to die down here? Would his parents, his friends, be left wondering where he disappeared to?

  Again I think of Sadie, how she must’ve died in this terrible darkness. If she did put a curse on my family, I honestly can’t blame her. But that doesn’t mean I’m just going to wait here for it to catch up with me.

  You’re trapped inside a well, probably with a witch’s corpse somewhere close by, and the only way out leads to an inferno. It already caught you, dipshit.

  As though to underline that thought, I hear a rumbling whoosh traveling down the water pipe toward us. And I don’t need to see the flames to know what that sound means: The liquor in the cellar just went up. There’s no way I can get out that way now.

  Back to Plan A: Break through the wooden boards covering the well. But the pavilion floor is gravelly, so who knows if breaking through the wood will be the hardest part—what if there’s concrete above it? And I can barely reach it.

  I scramble out of the pipe and reach for the ceiling again, just in case I grew in the last five minutes. I did not.

  The well is around five feet across, so too wide for me to be able to chimney-climb, though Dominic could probably do it. If he weren’t unconscious, that is. And not that he’d need to, because he could reach the damn ceiling easily.

  “FUUUUUUCK!” I scream up at it.

  And it’s only as my voice trails off that I realize it doesn’t have that same deadened quality it had before. Like it’s . . . escaping.

  I reach down for Dominic’s phone—which seems to have a beast of a battery, praise Satan—and hold the light up closer to the wooden boards for a better look. They seem pretty solid, but there are—

  The phone buzzes in my hand, and I almost drop it. But, as the screen lights up, I see a ton of messages and missed calls coming through.

  There’s a goddamn signal down here!

  It disappears when I bring the phone down nearer head level, but up in the corner, near those hateful wooden boards, there’s a bar. I don’t know Dominic’s passcode, but I don’t need it to call Emergency.

  I’m just trying to do that one-handed while I still cling to the wall, when the phone buzzes again. Mateo’s picture fills the screen. I thumb-swipe to answer, putting him on speaker so I can keep the phone raised.

  “Nic? Nic! Where the hell are you, man?” His voice comes through a little patchy, but it’s not hard to connect the dots. “The fucking house is on fire and I’ve been trying to reach you, but it kept going to voicemail and I thought you were fucking dead—”

  “Mateo!” I yell as loud as I can, hoping he’ll hear me and shut up. It seems to work.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Ava! I’m with Dominic, but he’s hurt and we’re stuck in an old well!”

  There’s a beat of silence, then, “You fucking what?”

  “There’s a covered well inside the pavilion . . . where Freya’s body was found,” I say, trying to figure out the best way to direct him here quickly. There was footage of the outside of the pavilion on the local news, the place still crawling with cops at the time, but I’m guessing Mateo saw it. “We’re inside and can’t get out! My uncle and his wife are trying to kill us—they’re the ones who murdered Freya and Ford and . . . Can you just come get us, please?”

  I wait for him to answer, but there’s just silence.

  “Mateo?”

  Then I hear the beep of the call disconnecting.

  Shit. Did he get that?

  I move the phone around, hoping the signal will dip back in and he’ll call again, but nothing happens. Time to try Emergency.

  But then a groan comes from behind me. “Nic?” I spin—or try to—but my foot slips from the edge of the pipe and suddenly I’m falling into inky-black water.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The water is ice cold. It forces all the air out of me as I thrash around, trying to claw my way out of it. My palms sing out in pain as my scars react to the sudden chill.

  No!

  Dominic’s phone slides from my grip, and I watch in horror as the light spirals down, down, down . . .

  It blinks out, either landing light-down at the bottom, or just too deep to see any longer.

  It’s only been a few seconds, but my chest is already beginning to burn for air, and in the pitch-blackness I feel as though I might be sinking down into the depths of the water, just like the phone.

  Panic clutches at me. I scrabble to find purchase on the stone walls with ice-pick fingers. In a split second of clarity, I think this must’ve been how Sadie felt. Betrayed by the people she should’ve been able to trust. Facing death in the dark, alone.

  Except I’m not alone, really, am I?

  My hand finds the edge of the pipe opening. I cling to it and drag myself up out of the water until I’m curled up inside the pipe. I feel for Dominic, find his outstretched hand. He’s cold, but I’m colder.

  “Nic?” I whisper through chattering teeth.

  He groans faintly, then squeezes my hand. I could weep with relief. “Please tell me it’s actually dark in here, and I haven’t just had my eyes stolen by a ghost.”

  Well, that is one thing I can reassure him about. “It’s dark, yeah. I think you passed out. How are you feeling?”

  Dominic laughs drily. “Like I’ve been hit over the head with a crowbar. But otherwise great.”

  I can’t see any humor in this, though. “I lost your phone. And we’re still stuck in here.” I sniff, catching a smell that instantly fills me with dread. “And I think the pipe is filling wit
h smoke.”

  “I see.” There’s no panic in Dominic’s tone, and I can’t decide whether to be reassured by that or to wonder if that crowbar messed with his ability to assess our absolute fuckedness. “I take it you couldn’t get the lid off the well?”

  “It’s too high. I can barely reach it with my fingertips. And now you can’t even see enough to give it a try.”

  “Describe the space to me.”

  I do, explaining as well as I can how he’ll need to perch at the opening of the pipe and use the wall to grip on to. Before he can squeeze past me, there’s an enormous bang from somewhere above us.

  “What the hell was that?” he hisses. The bang comes again, even louder this time.

  But I’m grinning so widely, I’m surprised he can’t see it glowing. “Hopefully, that’s Mateo coming to dig us up.”

  “You spoke to him?”

  “Yeah, but it was a bad signal, and I wasn’t sure he heard enough to figure out where we are. Looks like I was wrong.”

  Dominic doesn’t answer.

  “What?”

  “Not to be negative, but it’s also possible your uncle figured out where we might be and doesn’t want to take the chance of us finding a way to escape.”

  My smile dims. As far as I know, Uncle Ty has no idea this pipe even exists. But I also thought I knew Uncle Ty would never try to kill me for money, so there’s that.

  “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

  The banging continues for a few minutes—though it’s hard to gauge time while we’re huddled together in the dark. Dominic does his best to crowd some warmth into me. I’m pretty sure I’m just making us both feel colder, though. And the smoke is definitely getting thicker. I can taste it on every inhalation, and my head is starting to swim.

  Bits of wood and dirt rain down with each strike from above. I’m almost sure it’s Mateo. I mean, it has to be. If not, we’re about to come face-to-face with Uncle Ty and what sounds like a goddamn pickax.

  “Nic, when he breaks through that cover, I want you to stay hidden,” I whisper between strikes.