Pat's intention of skimming through the pages was frustrated from the start by the fact that there were no separate pages, only the thick bundles of the uncut fascicles. Opening the book at random, she came upon the following paragraph:
The more we learn of the victory last Sunday the greater it seems to be. They say the Yankee dead lay upon the field like a blue blanket. The arrogant ladies and gentlemen of Washington had anticipated triumph; coming in carriages to view the annihilation of our hopes, they carried picnic baskets and bottles of French champagne, all of which they were forced to abandon in their precipitate flight when their army was overwhelmed. Hurrah! We expect momentarily to hear of the arrival of our men in the enemy capital.
"Wednesday, July 24, 1861." Pat read the date aloud.
" Bull Run," said Josef, who had been reading over her shoulder. "First Manassas, as the Confederates called it. They might indeed have taken Washington then, if they had pressed on."
"It's all so impersonal," Pat complained. "Nothing about the family."
"An invaluable record, suh and ma'am." Bill saw a prospective customer losing interest, and increased the pressure. "There is considerable information there, as you will discover when you cut the pages. Naturally Ah would not do so until the book is sold. It is in mint condition and therefore much more valuable uncut."
Josef closed the book.
"How much?" he asked.
IV
"You didn't buy it?" Mark's voice rose to a squeal of outrage.
"For two hundred and fifty dollars?" Pat imitated his tone. Yet she felt defensive, and that angered her. "You act as if we had all the money in the world," she exclaimed. "From what we could see the book didn't have any personal material; it was written for publication, after all, so it must have been edited-"
"All right, I'm sorry," Mark muttered. He ran his fingers through his hair.
"I bought these," Pat said, proffering them like a propitiatory offering to an outraged deity. "This ragged little pamphlet cost me fifteen bucks. I mean, really, Mark-"
"I said I was sorry." Mark took the stack of books, like Jehovah accepting a less-than-perfect lamb. He tossed most of them aside with contempt, but the sight of the expensive pamphlet made his face brighten. "Hey, this looks good. ' Montgomery County Families of Distinction, and the War Between the States.' Maybe it mentions the Turnbulls."
"It does," Josef said. "We wouldn't have bought it otherwise. Your friend Peter…"
Mark wasn't listening. He had subsided onto the floor, cross-legged, his head bent over the little book. Kathy knelt beside him, her fair hair brushing his shoulder.
"Here it is," he said. " 'The Extinction of an old and honored family…' The old man was killed in 1863. In a cavalry skirmish, 'somewhere in Maryland.' His body was returned to his grieving family and interred with military honors in… Hey. Did you know you had a family graveyard, Mr. Friedrichs?"
"Forget it," Josef said promptly. "You are not going to excavate my backyard."
"Would you object if I just looked around for tombstones or-"
"Yes."
"Oh. Well, okay. The old man isn't the problem, anyway. It's Peter we… Oh, wow. Here it is. He was killed too."
Pat felt the same shock she would have felt at the news of the death of a personal acquaintance. In spite of Mark's conviction that Peter Turnbull was an arrogant, unpleasant young man who had become an even more unpleasant ghost, she found his death, at nineteen, tragic and disturbing.
Josef's reaction was less sentimental.
"So he did die violently in battle," he said. "Mark, how do you know these things, before we find written evidence? Are you holding out on us?"
Mark pretended not to hear the question. Perhaps it was not all pretense; he appeared to be genuinely puzzled as he read on.
"One of his men saw him fall. He was shot… It doesn't say where. But he fell over his horse's neck, and there was a lot of blood, and… That's it. The trooper who saw it was wounded too, he lost track of what was going on. He-the trooper-was picked up when reinforcements arrived and drove the Federal troops away." Mark stared raptly at the ceiling. "I wonder if his bones are still lying there, in the underbrush near White's Ferry…"
Pat let out an exclamation of disgust, but Kathy obviously found the idea more romantic than repulsive.
"Maybe that's what he wants," she suggested. "Burial in sanctified ground, with the rites of the church."
"You've been reading too many horror stories," her father said disagreeably. "I refuse to dig up half of Montgomery County looking for the remains of Peter Turnbull."
Rain pattered against the window. Pat reached up to turn on a lamp. It was already dark outside. An involuntary shiver ran through her. What would happen at one o'clock? Was Mark really determined to go through with the insane plan they had formulated earlier? She didn't want to ask. She was afraid of the answer.
"Food, anyone?" she asked.
"I made spaghetti sauce," Mark answered, his eyes still fixed on outer space, his expression remote.
"It smells as if it were burning," Josef said maliciously.
With an exclamation of distress Kathy leaped to her feet and ran out.
"What about a drink?" Josef asked.
Pat bit her lip. She had been about to suggest that this was no time for alcohol. But Josef's habits were none of her business. She revised her comment.
"What about some wine? I think there is some Chianti downstairs, in the wine bin-"
Mark snapped to attention.
"Wait, Mom, don't go down there. I mean-I'll get the wine. I mean-"
"I knew you were up to something," Pat said wearily. "What did you do this afternoon, Mark?"
Mark tried to look innocent.
"Now, Mom, what makes you think-"
"You're too clean," Pat said, inspecting his unspotted T-shirt and neatly creased jeans. "You changed your clothes before we got home. You wouldn't do that unless-"
"Ah, so that's your secret." Mark smiled at her, and her treacherous heart softened. "I'll know better after this."
Kathy came running back.
"It's all right," she announced cheerfully. "I turned it down and added some water. Was that all right, Mark?"
"Never mind the damned spaghetti sauce," Josef snapped. "What did you two do this afternoon? You've changed your clothes too, Kathy. What-"
Mark caught the implication and-to the surprise of his mother, who had thought him impervious to innuendos of that nature-turned bright red.
"It isn't what you think," he said angrily. "We got dirty, that's all. Cobwebs and mud and… We opened up the tunnel."
"Tunnel," Pat repeated blankly. "What tunnel?"
"The doorway Dad uncovered in the basement," Mark answered. His angry color had not subsided, and he avoided Josef's gaze. "He walled it up again, remember? The ceiling looked as if it were about to collapse, and you said it was dangerous, and-"
"That wasn't a tunnel, it was a room, a root cellar or-"
"It was a tunnel. The ceiling had fallen in, that's why we couldn't see how far it extended. Don't you get it, Mom? This house was a station on the Underground Railway. 'Freedom Hall,' Mr. Bates's abolitionist sympathies…"
"Show me," Josef said.
Pat never went into the cellar if she could help it. Unlike modern structures bearing the same name, or the more euphonious appellation of basement, the substructure of her house had never been designed for conversion into family rooms or game rooms. It was almost wholly subterranean, dank-smelling and dismal. The whitewashed stone walls had smears of green lichen, and water often oozed from the floor. Jerry had converted an old enclosed porch off the kitchen into a laundry room, so there was seldom any reason for Pat to go belowstairs. Though she was barely conscious of the fact, her dislike of the area was not based solely on its physical unattractiveness. Its unpleasant atmosphere went beyond damp and darkness.
Now, as she descended the wooden steps, she saw a gaping hole in the wall b
ehind the furnace. The floor was littered with bits of mortar.
"What a mess!" she exclaimed angrily. "Mark, how could you?"
"I'll clean it up," Mark said. His voice sounded distant, muffled.
"What were you looking for?" Josef demanded, ducking to avoid braining himself on the pipes that traversed the low ceiling.
"I don't know. I just thought maybe…"
Pat started forward, picking her way delicately through the debris. A low, eerie moan made her stop and turn. She saw Jud squatting on the top step. His bulbous eyes were fixed on the dark hole in the wall. He looked perturbed. But then, Pat thought, he often did.
"He sat there and whined all the time we were working," Mark said, indicating the dog. "That must mean something."
"It means he doesn't like damp, cool places," Pat said. "He's always hated the cellar."
Yet as she approached the gap in the wall she was conscious of a chill that transcended the normal dampness of the place. Cool, wet air wafted out of the darkness, like a draft. But there could be no passage of air through the earth that filled the far end of the hole…
Mark had brought a flashlight. He switched it on and turned the beam into the darkness.
Brick walls, green with mold, framed a narrow rectangle barely two feet wide. The floor was of beaten earth, shiny with damp. The low ceiling was supported by planks now gray and cellular, like elongated wasps' nests: the evidence of industrious termite colonies. Beyond the gap in the wall the open space was barely six feet long. It ended in a sloping wall of dirt.
"I remember this," Pat said. "Jerry found it the first year we lived here. We assumed it was just another room. What makes you think it was a tunnel?"
"I'm afraid he's right," Josef said, before Mark could answer. "It's too narrow to have been a room. Given Mr. Bates's abolitionist sentiments…"
For a moment no one spoke. The only sound was the heavy panting of the dog, so magnified and distorted by the low ceiling that it seemed to come, not from the stairs behind, but out of the darkness of the collapsed tunnel. Pat's scalp prickled. Surely more than one pair of lungs were emitting that agonized breathing. She seemed to hear gasps, low moans of effort and distress… How many weary, frightened men and women had crawled through that dark space, laboring toward freedom?
"Mark, you don't think…" Kathy began. She did not finish her sentence, but her gesture, toward the fallen earth, expressed the horrified surmise they all shared.
"No, no," Mark said reassuringly. "They would have dug the dirt out if the tunnel had collapsed while it was still in use. I think it gave way later, long after there was any reason for its existence."
"No ghosts here, then," Pat said. "You didn't find anything, did you, Mark?"
"No."
"Then let's go."
Their retreat was not dignified. If there were no ghosts in the buried tunnel, there was the memory of old cruelty and injustice. Pat recalled a friend of hers, an Army wife who had spent several years in Germany, describing a visit she had made to the former concentration camp at Dachau, now a memorial to the tortured victims. "I stalled at the gate," her friend had admitted. "I couldn't go in. I was sick at my stomach, unable to breathe." There was nothing supernatural or psychic about such impressions; they were simply a physical expression of the impact of tragedy on a sensitive mind.
All the same, she breathed more easily when they were upstairs, with the cellar door closed. Darkness was complete outside, and the rain hissed drearily against the windowpanes. After searching, Pat found a bottle of wine in the kitchen cabinet. No one volunteered to go downstairs again.
Josef drank most of the wine. He had had two drinks before dinner, and when they returned to the parlor, after eating, he went straight to the liquor cabinet. When he asked Pat to join him she shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. She could not see that he was visibly affected by what he had drunk. But she didn't like it. Her feelings must have shown on her face; Josef returned her unconsciously critical glance with a look of sullen defiance, and poured a sizable jolt of Scotch into his glass.
Mark settled down on the floor with the photograph album.
"I promised Jay we'd return this tomorrow," he said. "Mom, you better come with me."
"I have to work tomorrow," Pat protested.
"How can you think of work at a time like this? I'll call in for you, tell them you're sick."
"I can't do that!"
"Well, you can't sit up half the night and expect to work."
It had been expressed, the thought she had dreaded. Pat let her breath out in a long sigh.
"Mark, are you really going to go over there tonight?"
"We agreed," Mark said. "Nothing's going to happen, Mom. I promise."
Pat turned away with a helpless gesture, and met Josef's gaze. She knew what he was thinking as clearly as if he had spoken aloud. Mark was so sure. He had been un-nervingly accurate so far, in all his guesses and hypotheses. What source of information was he tapping? A possible answer occurred to her, and the very idea turned her cold with apprehension.
Seven
I
It was still raining at twelve thirty, when the men left the house. Without star- or moonlight, the night was as black as pitch. From Mark's bedroom window the house next door was a darker shadow in the darkness, eerily distorted by the water streaming down the windowpane.
Her forehead pressed against the glass, Pat strained her eyes.
"Your father is going to get soaked, squatting in that tree like a pigeon," she muttered.
The inane comment scarcely deserved a reply. Kathy made none. She knelt beside Pat, her face also pressed against the glass, and Pat felt the tension that held the girl rigid. She herself was ready to shriek with nerves. It must be the weather, she thought. There's no reason to be nervous. Nothing much happened last night; if Mark is right, tonight should be without incident.
The weather was certainly responsible for Jud's state of nerves, and no doubt the dog's misery was affecting her. Jud hated rain. No fool he, he knew that thunder and lightning often accompanied that atmospheric disturbance, and he was deathly afraid of thunder. He had been on Pat's heels all evening. Mark was a lot of fun, but when danger threatened, Pat was more dependable. He had accompanied them up the stairs and was now lying on the floor by the bed, his head under it. His agitated panting scratched Pat's nerves like a fingernail on a blackboard.
Something is coming.
The words flashed across her mind with the impact of a hot brand pressed against flesh. So keen was the mental anguish that Pat fell backward, landing with an ignominious thump, her legs doubled up under her. The dog was no longer panting, but whimpering-a craven, abject sound, as if Jud were so terrified he could not even express his feelings in a long howl of woe. Turning, with some difficulty, Pat saw the bed shudder as Jud forced himself under it, well-padded rump and all.
Even then she did not understand. She assumed the danger would come from the house next door, the house where her son and Kathy's father waited. She tried to get back to the window so she could see, and found her limbs so stiff she could barely move.
Then the smell reached her nostrils. The same foul, indescribable stench she had smelled twice before. And it came from behind her.
Squatting, awkward and ungainly, Pat managed to turn.
It filled the doorway. A thin, spinning column of luminescence, taller by several feet than she herself, the color of… But there was no word for that shade. It was part of the infernal aura the thing gave off, a deadly miasma compounded of parts the normal senses could not absorb. It was not heat or cold, not light or color or smell. But because the human sensory organs were limited, they had to translate it into terms they could transmit. So… her nostrils flared and her stomach heaved at the odor; her eyes winced away from the cold, pale burning; the hairs on her arms rose, as a current of… something… filled the room like smoke, acrid, choking.
The feeble remnants of reason left in her flailed
helplessly, seeking escape. But she knew she could not allow herself the luxury of fainting; bad as it was to face the thing, it would be much worse to lie powerless before it. It was not after her. She knew that as surely as she knew her name, her age, the color of her hair… It wanted Kathy.
She was fond of this girl; perhaps more than fond. But the strength that came into her body did not come from love or from any hypothetical maternal instinct. It came from without. Not in a great, overwhelming flood; it was more like-the incongruous simile occurred to her-more like liquid from a leaky faucet, slow and trickling. But it was strong enough to raise her, first to her knees, then, swaying, to her feet. With something like horror she felt her knees bend and saw her foot slide forward.
As she moved, one unsteady, reeling step after another, the thing in the doorway changed, in response to her advance. It thickened and shrank in height, as if condensing; and if its former amorphous contours had been hard to contemplate, this was worse, for there was in it a dreadful suggestion of human form. In the crown of the burning column two spots formed, like the low blue flames of a dying fire.
Through the pounding of her pulse, Pat heard a distant sound and recognized it: the door downstairs crashing back against the wall, as it did when Mark was in a hurry. The cold flame in the doorway flared and was gone, as suddenly as if air had first sparked and then overwhelmed its burning.
She was still on her feet when Mark burst into the room. He hit the light switch as he passed it, without pausing. Pat's eyes closed against the brilliance. She felt her son's arm around her, and pushed feebly at him.
"I'm all right," she said. Her voice gurgled idiotically. "I'm… How is Kathy?"
"She's just been sick," said Mark. "Hey, Kath, hang in there, will you? At least wait till I can get you into the bathroom."
The voice came from behind her. Pat opened her eyes.
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