by Anya Allyn
“The thing we didn’t do was to play the stupid pipe organ.” Ethan shrugged.
“That’s not sane,” Lacey shot back at him. “Henry will hear it.”
I couldn’t speak—just shook my head.
“He’s off chopping wood—far away,” said Ethan disdainfully. “Anyway—he might have had the entrance to the cave open that time we heard it. He probably thought there was no one about. Look at this place. How would you hear anything from above?”
Ethan strode over to the organ. He jabbed his fingers onto a few keys. The notes resounded around the spaces of the cave, mournful and disjointed.
Ethan dropped his head. “Okay, so that idea was all kinds of dumb.”
He seemed so lost, broken.
“Sounded better than Henry’s effort,” I offered. “Even if his was some kind of tune.”
Ethan stared around at me. “Yeah, he did play something.” He looked purposefully at Lacey. “Know what it was?”
Lacey crossed her thin arms. “What does it matter?”
“I don’t know. Probably doesn’t.”
She sighed—the kind of sigh a woman makes when dealing with a man who’s not making any sense. At least, I’d heard my mom make that sound when talking to my dad on the phone. A long series of resigned sighs.
With stiff steps she made her way onto the platform. She opened out the sheet music that sat on top of the organ. The faded title read Chopin Nocturne No. 20 in C-sharp minor. The pages were yellowed, crackly—she ran a finger along a section somewhere midway.
She began to play.
The sound wasn’t as beautiful as when Lacey played her own piano. The pipe organ had that over-the-top ‘circus’ kind of sound. But still, it sounded so different from the clumsy tune Henry had played. The melancholy, unearthly notes rose and fell—measures of sadness and grief.
Lacey’s hands moved lightly at the center of the organ. She brought her fingers down on the last, deep reverberating note.
A lock, or maybe a spring, released under high pressure.
I flinched, expecting something else to happen. But nothing did.
Ethan shone his torchlight in the direction of the sharp sound. A huge circular object was fixed on the dark recesses of a far wall. Metal spokes and tiny light bulbs ran around its perimeter. A faded blue and yellow star spanned the cracked wood.
“The original Wheel of Death,” mused Ethan. “They used to tie someone on these and have a knife thrower toss knives at the wheel.”
“Ugh.” Lacey took faltering steps over to see it.
A few of the bulbs flickered on, but the rest remained dead. We exchanged nervous glances. The light dimly illuminated an inscription in the wheel's center.
Moving close to the wheel, I strained to read the worn lettering:
Out of this wood do not desire to go,
Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.
I turned back to Ethan. “More Shakespeare?”
He twisted his mouth thoughtfully. “Yeah... it is. It’s from a Midsummer Night’s Dream. Can’t remember who spoke it or why, but the whole play talks about dreams a lot. Like how time is all messed up in dreams.”
Shrugging, he stepped over and reached for a spoke, attempting to spin the wheel.
With a crack-crack-crack, the wheel made a complete turn.
And swung outwards.
A massive hole gaped in the rock wall behind the wheel. Bitter air snaked towards us. The passage ahead was the still, cold black of a granite coffin.
My hand fumbled as I pulled my torch from my jean pocket. The three of us stepped wordlessly inside—we'd come too far not to. Our combined torch light barely penetrated the darkness. I just made out the sketchy outline of a rounded rock ceiling and walls, spearing down into a winding passage.
My foot slid on something that was not rock—something rubbery. I bent to snatch it up. It was one of those gel phone cases. I turned it over. My heart dropped through my chest. The pop-art image of John Lennon in tiny round glasses colored the back of the case.
“Aisha's...." Lacey breathed.
Ethan took stiff steps over, seizing the case and crushing it in his fist. He stared from the case to Lacey and me with dazed eyes. “You girls head back.”
I wanted to tell him no, wanted to tell him I was with him to the end. I needed to believe that the biggest part of me wanted to make up for betraying Aisha.
Lacey paced backwards, her face stretched tight across high cheekbones, eyeing Ethan coldly. “I’m getting the police.”
She'd stopped trying to conceal how she felt about Ethan hours ago, but I willed her to shut her trap. Now wasn't the time.
Ethan swallowed hard, as though pushing down anger, or hurt. “Do what you want. All I ask is to be the first one... to find Aish.”
“Ethan,” I said softly, “you know what you find... won't be her, anymore.”
He expelled a long breath of air. “Cassie... I know that. But she always hated the thought of strangers touching her stuff. She'd have wanted me to be the one. Just give me the rest of today—that's all. Call the police in the morning.”
“I'm not letting you disturb evidence.” Lacey folded her arms tightly. “Haven't you ever heard of a crime scene?”
My jaw trembled as I nodded. “Whatever happened to her is no accident. And the people responsible will want to keep it a secret. It's too dangerous...."
Out in the cavern, the light faded and snapped off. Dark filled every space around us. I rushed for the exit—my limbs as though in slow motion, Ethan and Lacey dark blurs either side of me.
The wheel slammed shut, spinning—and then stopping dead.
My breaths pushed through strained lungs. Ethan sprinted to the round door—training his torchlight around its perimeter. There were no handles, no switches. He let out a low, keening sound under his breath.
I flashed my torch about like a lunatic.
Ethan hurled his shoulder against the wood. It barely made a sound. “I need something to pry the door open with. But we’ve got nothing.” His voice cracked on nothing. “Looks like that freaking door was on some kind of time-delay.”
Lacey pressed her back into the wall, frozen. “What do we do now?”
“Maybe this keeps going... maybe it comes out somewhere in the mountains.” My words were tight, closed.
Lacey clamped her eyes shut, as though not wanting to commit to anything.
Ethan let the phone case unfurl in his hand, his attention fixed on it for a moment. “I vote we find her.”
We moved along the passage. There was nothing else to do. No one spoke. No sound but the sharp intake of our breaths. The blackness stuck to me with a tar-like grip, claiming me.
Were these the last steps Aish had taken in her life? Were these the last steps we'd ever know too?
12. NOCTURNE
I brought my watch up close to my face. We’d been walking for at least ten minutes. If the passage did extend through the mountains, the walk could take hours. Lacey and I were meant to be hours away, on the coast. And Ethan had told no one except us he was coming up here. That meant a grand total of no one who knew any of us were here.
The passage twisted back—and downwards. We continued on, walking at least the same amount of time again.
Something blocked the passage up ahead. Something big. A brick formed in my throat. I shone a shaky light over the large mass—the beam of light barely reaching it.
Lacey stepped forward, running her torch beam around in a circle. “It’s got... lots of heads .…”
We moved in slowed steps. Murky shapes solidified. The heads belonged to gargoyles and unicorns—on a child’s carousel. It was old—antique—like everything back in the cavern. It entirely blocked the passage. A metal wall divided the carousel in two—dividing it from whatever was on the other side.
Ethan jumped up onto the carousel platform and ran a hand over the center column. “Can’t find a switch or anything.”
We tr
ied heaving the carousel around, but it didn’t budge.
“What if …” I said quietly, “we just get on a ride?”
Ethan gazed back at me.
I raised my eyebrows at him. Riding carousel horses made as much sense as this thing being here in the middle of a cave tunnel.
There were eight rides to choose from. Lacey shook visibly as she mounted a red-eyed unicorn. Ethan and I stepped up onto a gargoyle and dragon behind her.
Tiny red and yellow lights flickered on along the center column. With a whirr the carousel began to rotate. I closed my eyes to the sight I’d find on the other side. Seemed a ridiculous way to meet your death, if that was what was about to happen.
Shadowy light made my eyelids flinch.
The lights were on here. Someone had to be here.
The carousel ground to a halt. Ahead was a rock wall that wound around into a corridor. I swung my leg off the dragon.
We stepped along the rock wall and peered around into the corridor. It flowed steadily downwards.
Lacey stared around. “Someone went to a lot of trouble if this is a gold mine.”
The walls and ceiling were almost perfectly round. They couldn't have been cut or blasted. I tried to imagine the size of the drill that would have to have bored through the rock. It would have to have been immense. Did they even have drills like that?
Ethan rubbernecked, facing Lacey and me. “What was that about a gold mine? Is that what you girls came here looking for?”
I gave a short nod. “Just a dumb hunch.”
Ethan’s mouth dropped. “More like dumb luck. I think the tunnel itself is natural.” He pointed at the craggy ceiling and walls. “It looks like the volcanic tubes sometimes created by flowing lava. There’s some in Hawaii I think. And Kiama on the South Coast here.”
I didn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified that the tunnel was caused by a volcano. I’d been to Hawaii on vacation with my mother when I was eleven, but either volcanic tubes hadn’t interested us or we hadn’t come across any.
Gingerly, we continued along the rock wall. Drafts eddied down from cracks in the soaring rock ceiling above. The walls ahead seemed to have dark spaces cut into them.
There was nothing to do but keep going now. Stepping forward, I ducked my head around the first space. My breath caught in my chest.
Inside the cavernous room stood an enormous kitchen. The wooden benches and chairs came up to my chest in height—a setting made for a giant. An antique bear and doll were seated on two of the ten chairs—the dolls much bigger than us.
An oversized kettle sat in the center of the table. For a moment, I was glad the dolls' backs were turned to us. But that was crazy—the dolls couldn't see us anyway.
Lacey placed her fingers on my shoulders, as though for support. “This can’t be real,” she whispered in a breaking voice.
A coldness writhed and twisted in my stomach. Something was very wrong here.
Ethan stepped inside, snatching up a heavy meat cleaver that hung from underneath a cupboard. He turned and gestured for us to keep moving.
A room on the other side seemed to be for storage. It held suitcases, drawers—and racks of dresses that were both enormous and girl-sized. Lace-up boots were arranged on the floor. I crept inside. Beside a set of cupboards and drawers, an empty space held nothing but two headless dummies—one adorned in a jet-black dress and the other a dusty antique wedding dress.
Shrugging our backpacks off, we placed them in the storage area.
Adjacent to the storage room, two shallow spaces had been cut into the wall, metal barred doors stretching across them. The metal doors looked like the ones I’d seen crypts guarded behind in old churches.
Ethan pushed open a door on the opposite side of the corridor. Fetid air seeped out—the airless, urine-soaked bathroom smell that caught your breath in subways. The room was tiled, with taps and a shower. He closed it quickly.
We rounded the next bend in the corridor—almost missing a natural crevice in the wall. The crevice was barely large enough for a human to squeeze through.
Lacey stiffened as she stared through it, flinging herself back against the wall. She opened her mouth either to scream or to tell us something, but was unable to do either.
Ethan and I peered inside. Ten huge beds were lined up in two rows, the ends facing each other. A giant Raggedy Ann doll occupied the bed nearest to us, and a wooden clown doll had been laid in the opposite bed—both of them had to be over eight feet in length. Smaller dolls with bright red cheeks occupied the beds further in, but the room was so dark I couldn’t see more. Apart from the beds, no pains had been taken to make this room look like a bedroom—the wall and floor had been left as natural rock—the room smelling of moisture and damp moss.
I reached to squeeze Lacey’s shoulder as we crept past down the corridor. She grabbed my arm and came with us. The sight of the creepy dolls would be even worse for her than it was for us.
The end of the tunnel branched into two uneven corridors—the left tunnel tapering into darkness. We headed to the right.
A massive chamber opened out—with black and white linoleum on the floor. Another carousel stood pride of place in the center of the room, except this one had horses. Wall-to-floor shelving held harlequin dolls, wooden puzzles, games, hoops, wooden yo-yos, monkeys riding unicycles and dollhouses complete with tiny figurines. A library of fusty old books sat against one wall—school desks lined up in front of it. The desks were large—they would dwarf a child.
A chandelier hung from the ceiling, but the lights weren’t on.
We backtracked and headed down the smaller tunnel. This one had been left in its natural state. It wound on in darkness, grower tighter and lower, water dripping as though the ceiling itself were bleeding.
I halted. “Can we go back?”
Ethan nodded. “I want to get out of this too.”
We headed into the chamber with the chandelier. Lacey sat herself on a brocaded daybed, hands tucked under her feet, her face immobile. I knew if my mom was here, she’d say Lacey’s showing signs of shock and trauma.
“There’s no one here.” I sat on the edge of the carousel.
“I can’t figure any of this out.” Ethan crossed his arms. “It’s like this was made for giant children. Crazy.”
“Maybe the old guy—Tobias—went crazy. From missing his family,” I said.
“Who’s Tobias?”
I told Ethan the story—the little that I knew about Tobias Fiveash and his circus family.
“Well, I reckon you might be onto something,” Ethan mused. “He went nuts. The only thing it doesn’t explain is why Henry’s kept it a secret all these years and why he still comes down here.”
“And why he keeps a generator running just to keep the lights on,” I said wryly.
“Yeah. Lights must be on here constantly. There's moss in some places, and that wouldn't grow in complete dark.” He ran his hands over his head, in that way I’d often seen men do. “I was scared out of my head at what I might see down here. There were things I thought I might see... that I didn’t want to see. But I never expected this.”
“Yes. Me too.” I nodded.
“We should take another look around, and if nothing tosses up, I vote we head back to the Wheel of Death. I'll use this meat cleaver to hack at the door if I can't find anything else,” he said.
“I second that vote.” I craved a shower, even just to wash all the slimy cave moisture off my skin. I craved my own bed, home. We needed to leave and let the police sort all of this out.
I wandered over to one of the large wooden desks that were positioned near the library of books. The desk was beautifully made and sturdy. So different to what we had at school now. We had desks that were just table-tops, cut in triangular shapes that tessellated.
The desk’s lid creaked as I lifted it. The cavity was filled with pencil drawings. Carefully, I carried them out and onto the desk top. The drawings were childish—those
massive balloon bodies and stick legs and arms that young children seemed to uniformly draw. On one of the pages, a more mature hand had drawn birds and butterflies, and the child had tried to copy—the child’s smudgy, lopsided creatures rising up the page.
I replaced the drawings, and then opened the desk beside me, expecting to find more of the same. But the drawings in this desk were exquisitely drawn—scenes of forests and dolls and horses. One of the pictures—a drawing of a young girl riding a horse—seemed to have been deliberately ripped.
“Either Henry has multiple personalities or the drawings aren’t all by the same person.” I traced a finger over the heavy lines of the pictures.
Ethan came to look.
“If this is all him, it’s creepy he draws pictures of little girls,” he remarked.
We checked the other desks. One of the other desks was empty, but the rest had more drawings—all seemingly drawn by different hands. I stared up at Ethan.
Bending, he studied the ripped pieces of drawings in the second desk. He scooped up the bits and assembled them on a desk top. The picture depicted a tiny red-cheeked girl riding a horse through sunlit clouds. Every muscle and sinew of the horse was expertly drawn, the horse’s mane rippling. You could almost see the muscles working under the horse’s flank and sense the horse reveling in its freedom. The child had her head back—her hair ribbon flying loose—far away in the wind. A name was penciled-in on the ribbon—Philomena.
Why would you toss away such an incredible drawing and keep the childish ones?
There was a mess of red paint in one corner—perhaps that was why.
Ethan slammed a hand down on the desk. “That’s Aisha’s horse!”
I stared back at the picture. The drawing certainly was like one of Aisha’s—but Ethan was surely imagining that this horse was Aisha’s treasured StarFire.
I rubbed a finger over the waxy red stuff in the corner of the page. A faintly-penciled ‘A.D’ revealed itself. The blood in my veins slowed and froze.
It couldn’t be. It couldn’t—
“Oh hell,” I gasped. “And that’s red face paint! Like on the dolls in the beds. What if one of the dolls sleeping in those beds... is not a doll?”