He provided the group with running commentary about each room. He described in lurid detail the tortures endured by abducted men and women a hundred years ago.
The inexplicable dread that had gripped him last time was all but forgotten . . . at least until they’d all crowded into the room that always felt so much colder than the others. He could see his breath in the flashlight beams slicing through the dusty air.
His arm hair suddenly rose with gooseflesh.
Gregory abruptly decided to skip the Lilli story, and all the rest of the stories for that matter, and expedite the tour. He decided he’d earned a drink. “. . . And this simple storage room was a long-ago pit for abducted recalcitrant women, who were dropped through the trapdoor you see above your heads, to a fate unimaginable down in the very bowels of the earth. They ended their lives right here, alone in the dark on the rotting mattresses, after falling from what must’ve seemed like heaven in comparison.”
As he’d expected, many flashlight beams joined his to highlight the old wooden square of the trapdoor high above.
The trapdoor moved.
Gregory peered, uncertain he’d really seen it. But the sheep were gasping and murmuring in awe, so it wasn’t just his imagination. It really had moved.
The spit in his mouth dried up. The cold in the room seemed to swirl around him with sinuous fingers, like a freezing lover. Or was he seeing things? Dust in his eyes? The bad air in the room, he told himself desperately.
It was Halloween. The night the spirits walked.
He stared up, petrified. The trapdoor opened.
“Lilli?” he whispered.
The dark square above was replaced by white flesh.
A body pitched through to land on a dusty old mattress.
Gregory screamed, which started the stampede. Someone knocked him down, but he managed to crawl off to the side, clutching his flashlight.
He raised it with trembling hands.
The nude body on the mattress—a man?—seemed uncomfortable. Gregory supposed it had something to do with the whip marks all over his body. Or possibly the tight ropes binding his wrists to his ankles, making his body arch backward into a painful-looking tight bow. Most likely it was the brand on his forehead, still oozing from recent application, but deep and distinct enough Gregory could see the letter G clearly.
Then, oddly, he smelled rose perfume. Gregory tightened his grip on the flashlight as all the muscles in his body seemed to turn to ice water. He moaned as he heard a woman’s amused whisper. “Now this is precisely what I’ve been waiting for, all these years.”
“Lilli?”
“None other.” In the soft tone he heard the satisfaction in her voice.
Gregory looked but couldn’t see anyone there. No evidence of the woman who spoke with such a faint, whispery voice soft as embers settling. He turned back to the man on the mattress, who’d begun to emit an unearthly shriek . . . just as he felt the cold grip of a woman’s slender hand over his, clicking off his flashlight.
Gregory scrambled to his feet and ran blindly, finding the stairs up by pure luck. Or perhaps he’d had guidance. As the sound of approaching police sirens filled his ears, Gregory also discerned the peals of feminine laughter echoing in the cavernous spaces as if from a distance of decades, laughter that would echo in his mind for as long as he lived.
The tour operator fled the Riverport undertunnels and could never be convinced to return.
APHRODISIA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2011 by Christina Crooks
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Aphrodisia and the A logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7582-7423-6
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