Texas Gothic

by Rosemary Clement-Moore

  “I thought you were calling it to you,” he said.

  “My Spanish is a little rusty.” I looked up at him, barely able to see his outline in the spectral light. “But do you want to stay here?”

  He cast a quick look around the cave, the dead end of our current situation, and squeezed my fingers. “Let’s go, then.”

  The light led to a passageway, became brighter as we followed it through twists and turns. The passage narrowed until Ben had to squeeze through, and I saw him pale with pain as the rock dug into his ribs.

  I wanted to let him rest, but an urgency pulled me forward. When I’d connected with the psychic knot inside me, it had drawn inexorably tight.

  When the passage got too low I dropped to my knees and crawled. I finally emerged into a small chamber. The ghostly glow suffused the space, illuminating a dead end, and a dead man.

  The skeletal remains of the soldier were dry and ancient and lay sprawled on a fall of earth like a rocky bed. The tatters of a uniform still clung to the bones, but the buckles and buttons and insignia had fallen ignominiously from the scraps of cloth.

  Ben, muttering pained curses, squeezed through the entrance into the small cave, falling onto the floor with a grunt. “Your ghost,” he wheezed, “must hate me.”

  “Shhh.” I knew better, from working on the dig that week, but I reached out anyway, picking up a brass crest, marveling at how old it was. It was still shiny under a layer of tarnish. “Ben, look. He was a soldier.”

  He did look. He looked at the bones, then looked around the cavern, which was barely tall enough for him to stand up and stretch his arms. “This isn’t an escape, Amy. It’s a tomb.”

  39

  “your ghost,” accused Ben, “has led us to a trap. Maybe the same trap that killed him.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions,” I said. But he was right about one thing. I couldn’t see an exit. The side of the cave where the skeletal figure rested seemed to have collapsed. Maybe that was why he’d died here. Or maybe he’d been killed by someone and never found.

  “His head is resting on something,” I said, crawling closer to look.

  “Amy, are you listening?”

  “It’s a bundle of black cloth!” With apologies to Dr. Douglas, I eased a finger under the stiff and rotted material, gently bracing the skull with my other hand so I didn’t dislodge it. “There’s something shiny. I can just see it.”

  “Amaryllis!” Ben’s voice seemed far away. “Come back to earth. We are in trouble here.”

  He grabbed my arm just as I pulled free a heavy metal object that rasped across the stone. The sound echoed through the cavern and down the passage we’d crawled out of.

  In my hand was a solid gold cross, barely tarnished, and inlaid with gems. They didn’t gleam in the ghost light, and I couldn’t see their color. But this was a precious item.

  Ben stared at it, too. “Oh my God. It is the Mad Monk.”

  A faint breeze stirred the dirt on the floor. “I don’t think so, Ben. This was hidden. And it’s not very … monkish.”

  “Did you read the story?” he demanded. “The one in the book? About how the Mad Monk—or whoever he was—ran off with the expedition’s treasure and was killed by his collaborators?”

  The wind was getting stronger, and colder. “If you knew that story,” I snapped, “why did you follow the light?”

  “Because we didn’t have a lot of options.” He chewed on his next words, and spit them out reluctantly. “And I trust you. But I don’t trust this ghost.”

  I could see his breath, as the temperature kept dropping. “Ben, now is not the time to be a jackass.”

  The glow that suffused the cavern seemed to pull in on itself, to gather near the wall closest to the skeleton. It brightened in the center, until I had to shade my eyes against the blue-white light.

  Ben’s hand tightened on my arm hard enough that I gasped in pain. Surprise made me drag my eyes from the gathering specter, and I saw that the fog of Ben’s breath had gone still and his other hand clutched his side.

  I knew that feeling. But if he struggled against the grip of the ghost, tried to force his lungs to work, and he had a cracked or broken rib …

  “Leave him alone.” I didn’t bother with Spanish, but took hold of the knot of connection between the specter and me and pushed my demand through it.

  Inocente …

  The word bloomed in my mind. Ben swayed on his feet, and I caught him around the waist, staggering under his weight.

  “If you’re innocent,” I said to the ghost, “let him go.”

  With the suddenness of a snapping bone, the specter released Ben. He gasped in a breath and clutched my shoulders as his strength returned.

  “Now,” he panted, “do you believe he’s a traitor?”

  Ben learned lessons the hard way. He held me against him, as if protecting me from the specter that had appeared, a colorless figure of light and shadow, across the tiny cavern.

  The figure raised its hand, but instead of pointing at me, it pointed to a chest next to the skeleton, half hidden by the fall of earth that had trapped him.

  Inocente …

  The voice seemed to be only in my head. Ben looked at me for guidance. I collected my courage and edged to where the ghost pointed. Ben followed me, still watching the figure warily.

  We dug it out together, a banded wooden chest the size of a toaster. Finally, exchanging looks and deep breaths of cold air, under the dark stare of the specter, we opened it.

  “Empty,” said Ben. He looked from the box to the motionless soldier, sorting through legend and evidence and trying to reconcile what was in front of him. “So he didn’t steal the expedition’s treasure?”

  I studied the ghost, who seemed to study me back. I’d never seen his clothes before, but as I took them in now, the pieces began to come together.

  “Look at him, Ben. He’s got a monk’s robe over his uniform. Maybe he was in disguise. He could have been a decoy.”

  He paused, fitting the idea into a theory. “Let their attackers see a priest with a shiny cross running off with a treasure chest?” He seemed to unbend, admit he could be wrong about the ghost. He nodded at the jewels and gold still in my hands. “I guess if I were a robber, I’d go after that.”

  Inocente.

  The ghost faded out, leaving us in utter darkness.

  I held my breath for a moment, waiting to see if he would come back, but the connection between us felt slack and unraveled, like a string with no tension on the other end.

  In the silence, another sound reached me. I knew Ben heard it, too, because his shoulder, pressed against mine in the close quarters, tensed.

  An engine noise, and a scraping, and the murmur of voices.

  “Do you think it’s the cavalry?” I barely dared to whisper. Ben murmured back, so close to my ear his voice didn’t even stir the air, “I think we should be very, very still.”

  40

  my heart tapped out a Morse code of tight, trapped panic. I might have fulfilled my duty to the ghost, but I’d still be linked with him forever, because my bones would lie with his for eternity.

  And Ben’s. I could feel his breath on my neck, stirring my hair. A strand tickled my nose, and my legs began to cramp. I ached to move but any scrape of rock would echo through the cave and give away our position.

  The voices became clearer as they rose in frustration and anger. Definitely not Phin and the state troopers, but Sparks and Kelly.

  “They’re searching for us,” Ben whispered against my ear. “We must have left a trail like a wounded buffalo.”

  I could feel his fight-or-flight tension, but there wasn’t room for fight and there wasn’t any place to go.

  And then I heard a rustle, something I’d never have heard if we weren’t crouched like mice in a trap. The sound made me notice something else I’d missed while distracted by bones and ghosts and the certainty of my imminent demise.

  “Do you smell that?” I
whispered. I felt him inhale, then sort of cough. “Guano.”

  “If there are bats, then there’s an opening to the outside.”

  Ben carefully twisted to check all angles, and I felt the change in his tension when he saw something. “Over there.”

  There was a flat opening hidden behind the soldier’s resting place, an infinitesimally lighter darkness against the cavern wall. I’d missed it because I hadn’t wanted to disturb the remains. But there was no helping that now.

  We had to crawl over the skeleton to get out. I tried to be careful, but in the dark I had to feel my way across. The fabric disintegrated, and bits of remnant flesh fell like scraps of leather. The bones cracked like dry twigs under my hands.

  On the other side, Ben boosted me over a row of stalagmites, and we worked around a bend … and suddenly I knew where we were.

  “I’ve been here before.” I looked up in disbelief at the cave opening, shaded with an overhang covered with bats. I’d been only twenty to thirty yards from the ghost’s remains two nights ago. “This is my bat cave.”

  Ben stumbled on the uneven footing of the layers and layers of bat guano and followed my gaze to the mouth of the cave. It was a long way up. “But we’re still trapped.”

  The rabbit warren of the cave carried Sparks’s voice to us, calling that he’d found our trail. How badly did they want to follow us? If they presumed the cave was a dead end, maybe they’d just let us rot, like the soldier without a grave.

  But the voices were getting closer, and Mike Kelly was a small guy—he could probably worm his way right through. I backed up a step in spite of myself, edging up against the nearly vertical cave wall. Ben stepped forward, hands clenched into fists.

  Then I felt a hard tug on the knot in my stomach, a wrench of warning.

  Cuidado, breathed a voice in my head.

  On instinct, I reached for Ben and yanked him against the wall. The phantom knot in my psyche gave a jerk and came loose, wrenched free by the force of what came next. There was a bang, and a whump that shook me to my bones, and the stone sky crumbled with a mighty crack that sent the bats into the air with squeals that made my teeth ache.

  I’d pulled us to the one spot without rock overhead, and Ben swung around, putting his back to the thundering stone rain, pressing me against the wall, tucking my head against his chest as he covered his own with his arms. The shaking of the earth melded with the shaking in my bones and the quake of fear even deeper, in the part of me that wasn’t ready to die yet.

  The roar went on and on, until I realized we were standing in sunlight, and the noise was in my head. Dust swirled in thick clouds around us, but it wafted up into open air. The roar became a ringing, and Ben raised his head to look around in amazement that must have mirrored my own.

  “Are we alive?” I asked, still in the shelter of Ben’s arms, squashed between his body and the rock wall that had saved us.

  “Seem to be,” he said, turning his head stiffly to look down at me, and wincing when he tried to smile. “I hurt too bad to be dead.”

  The sinkhole was now the size of an Olympic swimming pool, and we stood at the deep end. The roof of the bat cave had collapsed, at least as far as the low cavern where the solider lay. It cut Kelly and Sparks off from us, but judging from the continued rumbles and curls of dust, it might have done worse than that. The cave-in might continue far into the mine, trapping the men … or their bodies.

  I looked up at Ben. His hair was white with limestone and dust. Pale dirt clung to his face and caked in the places where he was bleeding. He had new cuts, and there were probably more where I couldn’t see them. And I didn’t even want to think about the bruises.

  Very carefully I stretched up and kissed the unswollen side of his mouth. “Thank you.”

  “For what?” He started to smile and thought better of it. “Not that I’m complaining.”

  “For making sure that I didn’t end up spending the rest of my life with you.”

  He laughed, then winced, then cursed. Then he said, “The hell with it,” and kissed me the best he could. It would be giving him too much credit to say it was as good as the night before, but it was still better than ninety-nine percent of kisses in the world.

  “Great Caesar’s goat.” Phin’s voice floated down from the rim of the sinkhole. “The earth caves in, and you two are making out?”

  I craned my head to squint up at her. “Tell it to me when you’ve had a near-death experience, Phin Goodnight.”

  She put her hand over her heart. “I just did. You gave me a coronary. We are going to have to invent an entire new category of the heebie-jeebies for you.”

  Mark appeared over her shoulder, lacking his usual upbeat luster. “The troopers are yelling at us to stay back until proper rescue workers get here. They’re worried the cave-in is still unstable.”

  Ben let me go, after making sure I could keep my own feet. “Tell them to get a move on. Amy needs to go to the hospital. She’s not as hardheaded as I thought.”

  Mark nodded. “Ambulance is already on the way. We found a guy with a head injury, dehydrated, but mostly coherent, except for talking about a ghost hitting him on the head. When we saw the dust, and felt the quake, we weren’t sure …”

  I waved that off for more pressing concerns. “Warn them there’s a whole network of caves under here, Mark. It’s a mine. Mike Kelly and Steve Sparks have been blasting underground, following the vein.… ”

  I trailed off, thinking about the ghost’s warning. Had he known the caves were going to collapse? Or had he caused it?

  “The blasting must have destabilized the caverns,” said Ben. “They’re in there, somewhere.”

  My stomach twisted in guilt, even though they’d been plotting to kill us. I looked at Ben, hoping he would understand. “Was there any way they could have survived?”

  He ran a comforting hand down my arm and linked my fingers with his. “If we did, maybe they did.”

  I hoped so. I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s death. Even secondhand, through my connection with the ghost.

  The field was full of emergency vehicles: state trooper units, the sheriff’s department, the fire department, an ambulance, and the CareFlite helicopter on standby.

  I offered to get Lila to look for the missing men, but another rescue-dog team was on the way. The EMTs wouldn’t let me do much but sit and watch and wring my hands with guilt. They wanted me to go in for an MRI, and Ben was threatening to haul me off to the hospital by force, but Mark pointed out that he’d probably keel over from his own injuries if he tried.

  The state troopers were on hand to confiscate the blasting caps and the dynamite I hadn’t seen. They had no trouble chalking up the collapse to an accident by a pair of claim jumpers, though Deputy Kelly insisted that, while he didn’t condone what his brother did, since Mike worked for a mining company, he would know how to handle explosives. The state law enforcement didn’t necessarily agree, and had some pointed questions for the deputy about why he hadn’t noticed someone was blasting underground in his part of the county.

  I’d figured that Sparks and Mike Kelly had used the old Mad Monk stories to stir up the ghost hysteria—to keep people speculating about any strange sounds rolling through the hills—but I hadn’t really thought about whether they’d included the other Kellys in their plans.

  Phin hung up her phone and slid it into her pocket with a decisive motion. “Mom is on her way to the hospital to meet us. Let’s go. No arguing.”

  I looked up at her from my seat in one of the patrol cars. “But I want to see if they find Kelly and Sparks. Steve Sparks just got in over his head, I think.”

  “Amy, they tried to kill you.”

  “I know.”

  “And they collapsed the cave with their own blasting caps and dynamite.”

  There, I paused. “No. Well, yes. But. It was the ghost’s last act. I felt our tie unknot. I found him, and he saved me.”

  She considered that for a
second. “Well, that’s a fair trade. I’m sorry I called him ungrateful.”

  “But that makes me responsible for …” I gestured to the massive hole in the ground, and the emergency vehicles all around us.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “I called the ghost. And it led us to it and then it warned me …”

  She gave me a long look. “Could you have warned Kelly and Sparks?”

  “No.”

  “Did you make them explode dynamite and hit people on the head and try to kill you?”

  “No.”

  “What a relief. I was worried you’d developed an over-inflated opinion of your powers of mind control and time travel. Because that’s what it would take for all this to be your fault.”

  I just stared at her, wondering if it was my headache that made her sound like she had actually mastered irony. Gingerly I touched the lump under my hair. “I don’t know what I think about your developing a sense of humor, Phin.”

  “Does that imply you don’t think I could build a time machine or master mind control?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that, so I didn’t.

  Phin took my arm and pulled me to my feet. I thought she was going to say something else, but for a long moment she scrutinized every bruise and scrape on my face, as if she were cataloging the damage for some experiment. And then she put her arms around me in a too-tight hug.

  I held in an “ow” and a little bit of a sniffle.

  Then she let me go and pretended it hadn’t happened. “Now stop arguing with me. Mark and I are taking you and Ben to the hospital, because it’s obvious you two can take care of everyone but yourselves.”

  41

  the August heat was thick and sticky as toffee as I stood in the private cemetery on the corner of McCulloch Ranch. There was quite a crowd, but Phin and I were among the inner circle, away from the photographers and spectators. Mom had come with us, and Aunt Hyacinth was there, wearing a black and gold cheongsam she’d brought back from China. Daisy, too, even though she swore she never went to cemeteries she didn’t know, lest there be any unfortunate surprises from below the ground.