“Cover me.” He dropped down into the well. The soles of his boots met the earth with the hollow clang of a sewer drain lid that reverberated through the ground underfoot. “It’s hollow,” he called back up.
“Can you figure out how to get in?”
Dandridge kicked aside the mud and dirt to expose a rusted iron circle set into the ground. He searched for a hole he could use to lever it upward, tried to claw at seams too thin for him to curl his fingertips into.
“There’s nothing to grab onto. No handle. No grips. No…” His voice trailed off. He dropped to his knees and brushed the blood-induced mud away from two small sections where there was no rust. They were textured differently from the rest of the iron cover. He pressed his palms over them and pushed down. Nothing happened. He tried turning it to the left. Nothing. When he twisted to the right, it turned with a grating sound until it reached a point where it suddenly dropped several inches, nearly causing him to fall forward. With a hydraulic hiss, the iron disc retreated into an underground recess.
Dandridge hopped up and braced his feet against the inner edges of the cairn as a dark maw opened under him. There was only darkness, a fathomless black tunnel that could have descended all the way to the Earth’s core for all he could tell. But the smell…the smell that rushed up to greet him made him gag. He had once been party to legal proceedings that had led to the exhumation of a casket that had been buried three years earlier. The stench that had billowed out of that coffin when they opened it paled in comparison to this.
Using the stones for leverage, he lowered his right leg through the hole and tentatively swung it from side to side until he encountered resistance, then sought a solid foothold.
“There’s something down here,” he called up to where Preston was balanced on top of the cairn with his back to the pit, covering the surrounding clearing. Straining, Dandridge clambered sideways until he could lower his other foot down. He transferred his weight and cautiously pressed deeper. There was another rung about a foot down, and another below that. “It’s a ladder, but I can’t tell how far down it goes.”
“Be careful,” Preston said.
The Special Agent’s warning fell on deaf ears as Dandridge descended the rungs, back pressed against the opposite side of the small tube. With each step, the stench intensified until his eyes watered and he retched repeatedly. The only sounds were the hollow tapping of his footfalls and the squeaking of his sweaty palms on the cold iron rungs.
If Maggie was down here, he was going to find her. And if anything had happened to her, he was going to avenge her.
Heart racing, legs trembling, he eased downward into the complete darkness of the tomb where the monster presumably waited with his baby girl.
A grim sense of foreboding passed through him, and with it came the certainty that only one of them, either he or the man he intended to kill, would ever see the light of day again.
Chapter Four
I
22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming
With a final sweep of the medicine wheel, Preston tucked his pistol back into his holster and dropped into the pit. He lowered his right foot onto the top rung in the waiting darkness, then his left, and hurriedly clambered down into the black depths. He spared a single glance back toward the circle of sunlight as he plunged deeper. Somewhere below, the sounds of Dandridge’s descent abated. A wan light rose from below him, highlighting the rungs just enough for him to hasten his pace. The outside world was all but invisible when the tunnel opened into a larger chamber and he stepped down onto a smooth stone floor.
Dandridge stood mere feet away, slowly illuminating the surrounding walls with his Maglite. Preston clicked on his penlight, drew his weapon, and aligned the beam with his sights. The smell was so awful he could hardly breathe. Is this where the man had brought his daughter? Had this horrible scent been the last thing she smelled? Had she contributed to it?
The room around them was square, perhaps fifteen feet to a side, each of which featured a lone dark opening leading away from them at the cardinal directions of the compass. Sloppily mortared cinder blocks reinforced the walls. The ceiling was reinforced with aged wood, through the slats of which something metallic glinted. It was a layer of corrugated aluminum, rusted to such a degree that he could see the bare stone through the gaping holes. No, not stone, but an ore of some kind, some sort of dense crystalline vein. The beam of his flashlight penetrated it slightly, suffusing it with a pale crimson glow.
“What is that?” Dandridge whispered.
Preston knew exactly what the sheriff meant. The ground thrummed slightly underfoot. It almost felt as though his fillings were vibrating. He shook his head in response and tried to pry back the darkness that filled the doorways with his penlight.
“We split up,” Preston whispered. “If you find anything, shout.”
He didn’t like the idea of exploring separately. They should have advanced into the darkness together, one covering the tunnel ahead, the other their rear. Alone they would be easier to pick off. The killer held every advantage here. But time was the most important factor. If Maggie wasn’t already dead, then it was only a matter of time before she was.
Unspoken between them was the certainty that there was someone else down there with them. Preston felt it in the icy exhalations of the tunnels around him, like breath on his neck. He had seen the same realization in the sheriff’s eyes.
Dandridge nodded to his right and inched forward into the corridor, pistol and flashlight raised at arm’s length.
Preston turned away and stepped into the black orifice before him. It was frightening how quickly his sense of direction had abandoned him to the darkness. The walls were bare, smooth stone, bracketed every few feet by rickety timber posts and cribs like an old mine shaft. Faded petroglyphs adorned the limestone, some smoothed to nothingness by time, others depicting an endless procession of stick figures and creatures from myth. Now was not the time to dwell upon them, for somewhere in the darkness, perhaps mere feet away, death lurked with a rusted scalpel.
The soft thrum became a mechanical shudder ahead.
His beam barely penetrated the darkness. He was beginning to feel as though the tunnel had no end when his light finally limned the terminal edges of the stone channel.
He stepped out into a room roughly the size of the first. A portable generator sputtered and coughed against the far wall, its exhaust vented into carbon-scored ductwork that led away along the ceiling to either side toward twin doorways. The small chamber smelled faintly of gasoline and diesel smoke, which barely managed to compete with the reek of decomposition. His beam played upon a single cord hanging overhead. He gave it a tug and the lone bulb bloomed from the cobwebs, casting a subdued brass glare over the room. There was a single mattress in the corner, dirty and stained with urine, the springs exposed in spots. Thick ropes were attached to eye rings in the concrete block wall, the entirety of which was stained nicotine yellow, save the black corona around the generator. Aged bloodstains decorated the floor. The wall to his left showcased a collection of tattered clothes: dresses, pajamas, shirts and jeans…all hanging from rusted nails driven through the mortar between the bricks.
This was where he kept them. Before he took them to the room Preston was now convinced was somewhere in these catacombs. The nightmarish room from the videos where the shadow man ultimately killed them.
He had to look away, look at anything other than the soiled mattress where his daughter must have once been bound and the trophy wall of clothing where her birthday dress surely hung. In doing so, he noticed the cables and conduits running along the ceiling. They were caked with dust and grime, and alternately hidden by the rotting rafters and the swaying cobwebs. The copper conduits fanned out across the ceiling, a network of arteries leading away from the generator and into the dark tunnels that exited either side of the rear of the room at ninety-degree angles to the point at which he had entered.
Preston was contemplating whether
or not he should follow one of the perpendicular channels or if he should return to the main hub when he heard commotion from down the corridor to his right, then a muffled curse.
He recognized Dandridge’s voice. It sounded so far away…
The hair on the back of his arms rose electrically.
Slowly, silently, he aligned his penlight with his pistol and walked out of the room into another bare stone tunnel.
II
Dandridge pushed himself back to his feet. He had been so focused on everything around him that he hadn’t been paying close enough attention to the ground. The cardboard box that had tripped him lay crushed in front of him, its contents scattered across the floor. There were packets of dehydrated rations in plain black and white packaging everywhere. They appeared to have been manufactured half a century ago. The flashlight confirmed that a good dozen more boxes contained the same payload. He turned the beam toward the wooden ceiling and caught the shadow of a string hanging in the middle of the room. A sharp tug summoned a weak glare from the exposed bulb. A cache of dusty bolt-action rifles and M16s lined the wall to his right, caked with dust and connected by cobwebs. Cases of ammunition were stacked beside them. Old wooden barrels dominated the rear wall between shadowed corridors leading to either side, their metal bands rusted to the point that they barely held the planks together, their circular lids no longer firmly seated.
It was a survivalist’s den, possibly a bomb shelter assembled as the Cold War was beginning to ramp up. At a glance, he figured there were probably enough supplies for several people to hole up down here for many months, if not years. So where had they gone and why had none of them ever returned to at least reclaim their firearms?
He approached the nearest barrel and tipped back the lid, tearing away the spider webs that held it in place. Through white strands and funnels riddled with insect carcasses, he saw the hint of olive-green fatigues and manila bone. Skeletal remains had been crammed into the barrel in the fetal position, the cranium fractured like an eggshell. He opened the next barrel, and the one after that. Each housed the decomposed corpse of a man—
Footsteps to his left.
He swung his pistol toward the sound. Preston materialized at the edge of his flashlight’s reach, penlight and weapon pointed right back at him. Dandridge lowered his pistol and returned his attention to the chamber. A section of the bricked wall had been torn down and lay in rubble on the ground where the boxes of rations once must have been piled before being shoved awkwardly into the room. His beam spotlighted a wide oval of limestone conspicuously bereft of the layer of dust that clung to every other surface in the room. There was another petroglyph, similar to those carved into the walls of the tunnel that led here. He recognized it from the professor’s description of its twin hundreds of miles away. Rows of smaller figures to either side of the mouth of a pit, at the bottom of which was a larger figure that was connected to another one in the sky by a series of wavy lines. There were stars and spirals, and other etchings that were much lighter, more recent additions. Geometric equations solved in angles and degrees, ratios and conversions taken out to several decimal places.
“The rooms are connected by rounded corridors I assume parallel the outer ring of the medicine wheel,” Preston said. “The only thing in the room I just cleared was his wall of trophies.”
“We need to keep moving,” Dandridge said. His daughter was down here somewhere. Call it paternal instinct or even wishful thinking, but he was certain he could feel her nearby. And her silence scared the living hell out of him.
Together, they made their way back to the central chamber, which was now imbued with a soft rose hue. Through the slits in the wooden supports, the metallic ore glowed subtly. Was it a trick of his eyes after bumbling through the darkness…or something else?
He inclined his head toward the tunnel to the left to signal his intent and entered the mouth of the earthen orifice, leaving the Special Agent to explore the lone remaining branch. Slowing his pace, he scrutinized everything his cone of light passed over, prepared to pull the trigger at the first sign of movement.
They were down to two rooms. Either he or Preston were about to confront the man who had abducted their children and killed so many others.
A meek whimper from the darkness ahead.
Dandridge sprinted ahead, support timbers flashing past to either side in the shadows. A weak glow grew brighter ahead with each step until he could see the room beyond the end of the tunnel. He took in the details as quickly as he could. A stack of crates just across the threshold. A video camera on top. Past them, the sides of a wooden workbench. He couldn’t see who was on the table, or if anyone even was, but if Maggie was lashed to that blood-crusted sheet of particleboard, he had just run out of time.
He burst into the room and shoved aside the crates, which toppled to the floor and splintered with a loud crashing sound. The camera clattered away under the vile workbench. There was no one on the cutting surface. The rope bindings hung limply from the sides. His brow crinkled. He was sure he had heard—
A whimper from his right.
He turned toward its origin. A mound of filthy blankets was heaped in the corner. Something shuffled underneath them, just the slightest rustle. He threw himself to his knees in front of them, set down his pistol and light, and tossed the blankets aside as fast as he could. They were repulsive, stiff with urine, blood, and a host of other smells he couldn’t identify. Hands trembling, breathing haggard, he struggled to uncover his daughter.
A meek mewling sound rose from under the last remaining blanket. He sobbed as he tore it away and revealed tangled blonde hair, dirty bare skin.
There was a loud crack he felt clear into the marrow of his bones. His vision swam. Warmth trickled down the back of his neck and under his collar. A throbbing pain gripped the base of his skull. He focused on the small pair of terrified blue eyes that stared up into his.
Maggie whined around the soiled sock that had been stuffed into her mouth and started to cry. She reached for him, but her wrists were lashed together.
He slumped forward and fell onto his daughter.
She clawed at his face, pulled his hair, tried to lift his head.
Her skin was warm against his cheek.
Whimpers that sounded as though they came from miles away followed him into the darkness.
III
Preston stood stock-still in the middle of the room. The entire scene was incongruous. A laptop computer rested on an ugly table fashioned from wooden scrap. Bloody handprints covered the casing as though the monster had been in such a hurry to review his work he hadn’t even taken the time to wipe his hands on his pants. Cords led away from it in every direction. Power, inputs, outputs. A beating heart transplanted into a long-dead corpse. He should have expected as much, he knew, but for whatever reason he was still surprised. A laser printer rested on the floor beside boxes of blank DVDs and other memory storage devices. There were reams of unopened photo-quality printer paper and unopened ink cartridges.
He pulled the light switch and illuminated the otherwise barren space. The walls, however, were plastered with photographs. To his left, images printed from the laptop. They were hazy stills, snapshots stolen from the video feeds. Hundreds of them. Taped to the walls, to one another. An endless, seamless cavalcade of death. All children. He recognized their faces, for he had been hunting for each of them, some for as long as seven years. Only these weren’t the smiling visages from the school pictures and the random snapshots. These were images of expressionless, dead children, his daughter among them. Bound to the table. Spatters and smears of blood on their faces and shoulders. Their glassy, partially-opened eyes windows into death.
Twenty-seven horizontal rows, one for each child.
Preston noticed that the children weren’t the primary subject of the pictures. In each, a golden starburst like a blinding reflection, ill-defined and out-of-focus, bloomed from the chest of each victim. The images were aligned sequential
ly in a series separated by fractions of a second, depicting the ball of light as it swelled from a pinprick to the point that it nearly eclipsed the child’s chest, and then diminished again to nothingness. He had seen the same thing in real-time on the recording that had been left for him at the sheriff’s house. Just a quick flash, a tilting mirror catching a reflection from the sun. Dandridge had seen it too, and had even commented that he had noticed it on one of the other videos.
What in the name of God was it, and how had the killer created it during the murders? Had there been someone else operating the camera while he performed his grisly act? Was it a trick of the lighting? A visual effect?
He turned and scrutinized the opposite wall, which was similarly covered with pictures. Only these weren’t letter-size computer printouts. They were actual enlarged photographs, slightly grainy and yellowed. The camera’s flash washed the subjects in an amber glare. More children. In a small room like the previous sets, only somewhere different. The walls weren’t made of concrete blocks, but from packed earth from which serpentine roots protruded. There weren’t numerous nearly identical pictures that could function as a flipbook that showed the genesis and dissipation of the hazy golden shape, but only two or three, the contrast blurry, making the children’s faces appear smudged.
The rear of the chamber was similarly decorated, however the photographs were black and white, the edges curled and browned. Behind the subjects, the wall was constructed of smooth stones, stacked and mortared. A root cellar like the one at his grandmother’s Colonial home in rural Virginia. There was only a single snapshot of the bright starburst, which nearly whitewashed the child’s face.
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