Then the curtain flipped closed behind them. A second later, it came to rest, and it was as if they were never there.
Robert’s slowly opened his eyes, his breathing still slow and regular. As he waited to recover from the vivid memory, his gaze began to focus on the dark red curtain at the back of the altar. In his vision, it had been a plush, bright crimson, but today, it was a dull red, pilly and neglected.
But it was the same curtain nonetheless.
Robert knew where Father Callahan had kept the book. He had known it all along.
Chapter 18
A quick glance revealed that the church’s few parishioners were predictably too engrossed in their own heads to even acknowledge him.
Robert teased the curtain back and peered behind. The space was much like he remembered it: a rectangular area about five feet deep that ran the length of the altar. There was a folding table on the side opposite where Robert had entered, upon which sat a box of wafers and several half-empty bottles of wine for Mass.
Robert strode over to the table with a purpose, but as he approached, his heart began to sink.
Like the files in Callahan’s office, the candles out front, it was clear that the people that had searched the church before him had come back here, too.
“Shit,” he murmured. He was coming to the realization that not only was it possible that the people who had been here before had found the book, but that it was almost a given.
Whoever they were.
As Robert picked up the wafers, he scolded himself for being so stupid.
You thought that you would just saunter up to the church and the book would just be sitting on the desk for you? Maybe with a giant beacon of light illuminating it from the sky above?
He tossed the wafers back on the table, his eyes focusing on the wine. It didn’t seem like a half-bad idea. But as Robert reached for one of the bottles, he noticed a small Post-it note beneath where the wafers had lay.
As soon as he picked it up, he knew that it was meant for him despite the lack of salutation.
It was just one sentence, scrawled in crooked handwriting; Father Callahan’s hand:
Hide-and-seek.
The memory came like a lightning bolt in his brain.
“No, not just behind here,” Kendra said, “but in here!”
Robert looked at the wild girl before him, and grimaced.
“Where? I don’t see—”
Kendra pushed the wall, and he heard a click and then a secret door, only about three feet tall, popped open.
Robert’s eyes bulged.
“What? How?”
Kendra giggled and shook her head.
“Just get in—quick, before Christine comes!”
Before Robert could say differently, before he started to complain, to tell Kendra that, ‘Oh, I don’t know, this seems like a bad idea, Father Callahan won’t be happy,’ he was yanked inside a tiny, hidden room that reeked of soot and flame.
Robert blinked, and his gaze immediately went to the spot on the opposite wall. Like back then, he couldn’t see what Kendra had; the plaster wall looked just like a plain old wall. Sure, it was in dire need of some cosmetic repair, but there was no hint of a secret door.
“It must be in there.”
When Father Callahan had seen them head behind the curtain all those years ago, he must have known that Kendra would have found the secret room.
His gaze darted to the sticky note once more.
Hide-and-seek.
Robert immediately went to a spot on the wall that seemed familiar, and pushed, his heart racing.
Nothing happened; he felt only plaster beneath his hand.
There was no click, no give even.
Robert moved his hand a little lower and to the left, and pushed again.
Nothing.
Frowning, he took a step backward and examined the wall for a seam or maybe a shadow. The problem was that the plaster was so old and badly damaged that there were seams everywhere. There could have been a thousand secret doors, or none at all.
One vertical line in particular looked promising, and he pressed just below it.
Still nothing.
His frustration was starting to mount, along with skepticism.
Was that a real memory? How come I know nothing else about this girl? About Kendra? Who is she? Where is she?
Robert couldn’t help think that maybe these memories or visions or whatever the hell they were were simply some sort of idea that Sean had somehow injected into his mind.
After all, it had been at the Harlop Estate with Sean that he had had his first memory, that time of being dropped off at the church. It had also been under Sean’s encouragement, his guidance.
Maybe he hypnotized me?
Robert shook his head.
I don’t remember—why don’t I remember?
He could vividly remember his father and mother, Alex and Helen Watts, a litigator and a homemaker, and he could even remember the house he grew up in. True, he couldn’t remember much before he was six years old, but who did? His memory of his grandfather was equally vivid, especially the way the man always smelled of cigars and how he had taught Robert how to cut his own.
He couldn’t remember anything about his supposed brother, Carson, or Leland, or…his real mother? She had never appeared in his visions.
At least not yet.
Robert pushed the wall again, this time with the heel of his hand hard enough to make him wince.
Visions, memories, the Marrow.
For what felt like the hundredth time, Robert thought that all this time he was either hallucinating, or that he was actually dead already.
“Where the hell are you?” he grumbled.
As he systematically moved a foot to his right and prepared himself to slam his hand against the wall like an idiot again, a sudden commotion from the other side of the curtain stopped him cold.
“Alright, everyone out—church is gonna be closed for an hour or two,” a man said from out front. The voice was muffled from behind the thick curtain, but it sounded familiar to him nonetheless.
“Ma’am? I’m sorry but you’re going to have to leave. Just for an hour or so, then you can come back in.”
Robert heard a woman protest, but the man was persistent.
The church is closed?
Heart racing, Robert waited silently for what felt like an hour. Finally, he heard the front door click closed, and then another person spoke up.
“Clear. Why we here, anyway? We searched the church already.”
There was a short pause. And when the first man replied, he sounded much closer than he had before.
“Boss told us to search again. He wants the book.”
Boss…
Robert’s eyes bulged.
Aiden!
It was the man from the helicopter, from Seaforth. The one with the chewing tobacco jammed in his lip, who had helped him and Sean survive the mess hall disaster.
And they’re looking for the book…on Sean’s orders.
Robert whipped his head around and began using both hands now to press the wall, desperately trying to find the door.
The last thing he wanted was to be caught here by those men.
Sean had permitted him to leave the helicopter, but he wasn’t so certain that if they crossed paths again, that he would be so eager. And Robert hadn’t forgotten that they had been in the process of flying away when he had stumbled out of the prison.
“A book? This is all about a book?”
Robert kept pushing the wall, sweat dripping into his eyes.
Where the fuck is it…where the fuck is it…c’mon, open the fuck up!
“A book,” Aiden confirmed, his voice directly on the other side of the curtain now. “But you know what he said to do if we come across Robert.”
“Ten four.”
At the sound of his name, Robert became even more frantic. He glanced over his shoulder while he pressed randomly on the wall, and caught sight of a hand g
rip the edge of the curtain, less than ten feet from where he stood.
“What’s with this book, anyway?”
“You ask too many questions, you know that, Mark?”
And then Robert heard a muted click.
Yes!
The secret door popped open, the same size and shape as in his memory. Robert yanked it open and, without even looking, he jumped inside and pulled it closed behind him.
“Just a curious fella, I guess,” Mark said a split second before the curtain was yanked back.
Chapter 19
Robert waited in complete darkness for what felt like several hours. He heard the men outside the secret passage rifling through the late Father Callahan’s items and stomping around just inches from where he sat. Even after they had receded into the main church area, their voices far too muffled behind the hidden door to make out anything specific, he waited.
And then he waited some more.
And some more.
Only after what felt like several hours did Robert dare pull from his pocket the burner cell phone he had picked up at the same time as the sunglasses and check the time. It read 2:20. He hadn’t checked the time when he had arrived, but he knew that he had left the records building around 12:20, so guesstimating a twenty-minute drive to the church, ten more minutes fucking around without finding the passage, and all told it meant that he had been cramped in the hidden room for an hour and a half.
His legs ached and his back throbbed, the latter necessarily crooked to allow him to fit in the small space. Although he didn’t remember much of the time that he and Kendra had hidden in here, it was obviously much more comfortable back then, as both of them had fit. As it was, something hard poked into his hip, and there was what he presumed was a shelf poking into the back of his head.
And it reeked of soot.
Robert shut off the cell phone and waited.
And waited.
He had seen Aiden at Seaforth; he knew the man to be calculating, precise, no nonsense, unfazed by the horrors around him. So even when it felt like his whole body had become numb from being half seated, half crouched for hours, Robert remained still and silent.
When he turned his phone on again, it was nearly four o’clock. Only then, after not hearing a sound for a long, long time, did Robert dare use his phone’s flashlight. He was almost positive that no light could eke out from the hidden door, but it wasn’t worth the risk—until now, when he was absolutely certain that the men were gone.
The room was even smaller than he’d thought, and he immediately experienced a psychosomatic response to the confined quarters. He wasn’t typically claustrophobic, but his muscles ached, and seeing that he was crammed in a space that couldn’t have been much larger than a square foot, made his muscles seize as if racked with tetanus.
The passage extended upward, beyond the reaches of the weak light from his cheap cell phone. The thing digging into his head was indeed a shelf as he had first thought, but it was empty. He tried to turn around, but could only manage to get halfway before another shelf jammed into the soft tissue between his ribs. Instead, Robert reached behind him and grabbed the thing that was poking into his back.
His initial response was one of frustration; it wasn’t the book—it wasn’t Inter vivos et mortuos. Instead of an ancient text, the dark navy cover felt like plastic, as if it had been purchased from a drug store.
When Robert opened the first page, he realized that it was a photo album. Interest piqued, he held the flashlight to the black-and-white photograph.
It was a much younger Father Callahan and a man who looked a lot like Sean Sommers with his arm around his shoulders. In fact, it looked too much like Sean as Robert knew him now. Father Callahan, on the other hand, looked some thirty years younger, and the quality of the photograph suggested that it was at least that old.
But it certainly looked like Sean—the same stern expression, the same square haircut, a cigarette dangling from his lips.
His father, maybe?
Robert was in the process of flipping to the next page when he felt a bolt of anxiety.
Not here for a trip down memory lane—you never know when they might come back. Focus, Robert. Focus.
He was here to find the book.
He was here for Inter vivos et mortuos.
Robert closed the album and held it in one hand, while at the same time splaying the cell phone light on the other shelves. The photo album was the only thing on the lowest level, and as he moved the cell phone upward, he realized that it was the only thing on any level, at least as far as he could see.
On a whim, he reached up with his left hand and felt around the shelf just above his head. The only thing he got for his trouble was a face full of dust. On instinct, he inhaled, and then stifled a cough as the dust coated the inside of his nose and sinuses.
“It has to be here,” he whispered after successfully forcing the cough away.
Hide-and-seek.
Robert sighed and rolled his neck, trying to work out a crick. As he did, he stared upward into the darkness. For a moment, he said and did nothing, but with the flashlight now pressed against his jeans, face down, his eyes slowly became accustomed to the pervasive darkness. And there, about fourteen or fifteen feet up, he thought he caught sight of something protruding from a shelf. Something that could be the corner of a book.
It could also just be a defect in the shelf itself. The ones on the lower levels were the shitty particle board kind, and he wasn’t at all sure why Father Callahan had installed them in the first place.
Or why he would build them so high.
Still…
Robert squinted harder, straining to make out more of the shape.
Failing to identify anything else, he brought the light up again, but when this only served to blind him, he gave up trying to figure out what it was.
At least from a seated position.
Stretching and straining his leg muscles, Robert somehow managed to rise. With a groan, he tried his best to hyperextend his back, to work out the knots that had formed over the afternoon.
To his dismay, he still couldn’t tell what the object even when standing.
There’s only one way to find out if it’s the book.
Without thinking, Robert jammed the photo album into the back of his pants. Then, after reaching upward and confirming the solidity of the shelves, he started to climb.
Twice Robert panicked, thinking that the shelves were going to give way. But while they flexed and bent, they somehow managed to hold. He systematically went up, putting the cell phone on the next shelf as he moved up a rung.
And when his feet rested on the fourth or fifth shelf, he had made it to the object in the dark.
Shifting the cell phone onto that shelf, which was now at eye level, Robert squinted and waited for his pupils to dilate.
And when they did, a sigh of relief passed over him.
It was a book; a book with a thick leather cover coated in dust. Without thinking, Robert blew on it and the air instantly became thick with soot. He tried his best to stifle his cough, as he had done before, but the dust motes, thick as pregnant beetles, caught in his throat and he was overcome. His body shuddered with the intensity of the cough, so much so that he nearly lost his footing.
His reaction was so visceral that he dry heaved from it, all the while blood pulsed in his ears like an ocean reminiscent of the Marrow.
When he finally managed a deep, hitching breath, he heard the voices. They were still muffled, but their shouts were close and distinct enough for him to make out the words.
Aiden and the other man, Mark, hadn’t left the church after all.
He pictured the man with the chewing tobacco jammed in his lip, the automatic weapon resting against his shoulder.
I should have known.
“…in the walls…he’s in the walls…find the door…”
Robert’s pulse was pounding so hard that his entire body rocked. He let go of the book and
flooded the light from the cell phone upward.
He coughed again, and in between heaves, he could hear someone pounding on the wall somewhere below him.
Robert slipped the cell phone between his teeth, grabbed the book in one hand, and did the only thing that he could think of.
He went up.
Chapter 20
Robert’s arms were burning, and the thick layer of dust that coated his mouth and throat made it difficult to breath.
And yet upward he climbed. The shelves had since given way to simple bricks jutting from the walls, and they had become progressively grimier on the way up. The soldiers continued to thump on the walls below, desperately trying to find a way in. Eventually, they would find the opening, but he was more concerned with the fact that they might just get bored and begin firing into the walls instead.
After all, Robert had the book and, for what it was worth, he had the photo album, but neither of these would do him any good if he was dead.
Robert pulled himself up another foot, trying, and failing, to do some mental gymnastics to figure out how much higher he had to go before he reached the top of the church. He wouldn’t even allow himself to consider the possibility that there wasn’t a way out up top.
One more rung, and the crown of his head struck something solid, causing his teeth to snap down on the tip of his tongue. Pain radiated from the point of impact, but he fought the urge to cry out. Unlike the coughing fit that had given him away the first time, this time he won the battle. Delicately balancing the book on a jutting brick, and with the cell phone now clenched between his teeth, Robert used both hands to push up.
Nothing happened—it was just like pushing against the wall below.
Robert forced the pain in his arms and legs away and pushed upward with all of his might. Just as he ran out of strength, he felt something give—just a little, but enough to fuel his hope.
He relaxed his arms again, reset his feet, then took a deep breath. Just as he reached the end of his exhalation, he heard a sickening sound from somewhere far below him.
Scarsdale Crematorium (The Haunted Book 4) Page 9