by David Irons
'What Gregory said on the film — going inside can be your way out — down there… that's how we get out,' Kelly said with a worry in her big brown eyes.
Alex looked at the gaping hole and saw the faint hairs on the girl's arms standing up to attention. He snorted and pointed at the exposed winking devil's face tattoo on Jennifer's arm, and read its text out loud. 'Come on down — nice, shall we do what your friend on your arm says?' he mocked.
A shiver fired through Jennifer's body, what felt like a pulse stretched on her flesh where the tattoo was marked.
'Don't worry about what my friend on my arm thinks,' Jennifer said, 'the owner of the arm thinks we're all idiots for coming here in the first place. The things we do and places we go in case we can pocket some cash, right Lomax?'
Alex raised his eyebrows in a nonchalant way, uninterested in her response; knowing she was right.
'I think if we want out of here,' Jennifer said, taking her arm away from the hole, 'then I think we go down.'
CHAPTER 11
Alex glared at the dirty human sized hole in the coffin. 'You ain't getting me to climb in that thing!' he yelped.
'What the hell is down there?' Matt added.
'That sick fuck,' Kristi seethed. 'It's all a game to him, isn't it? Riddles and clues. Jesus Christ.'
The priest threw her a look, never normally tolerating such language about the big guy upstairs. But with this hard-boiled woman who already had an axe to grind with him, he bit his tongue once more.
Walking over to the bored-out hole, Matt took his cell phone and used it like a flashlight, peeling back the loose, torn fabric. Leaning in the coffin, he peered into the dankness below as the uncomfortable draft of cold air moved around him. He squinted, following the small but powerful beam of light from the phone; the illuminating ray revealed struts of a wooden ladder embedded in the earth wall. Trying to adjust his eyes to the beam and the darkness below, he could see nothing more, but heard a distant, echoing, clicking sound.
'What's down there?' Jennifer asked
Matt pulled himself back out, turning his phone off. 'Well for one thing, there's a ladder, it goes down maybe, twenty, thirty feet from what I can make out.'
'See anything else?' Alex queried.
'I couldn't, but there's something down there… clicking.'
'Clicking?' quizzed Alex.
Kristi's eyes widened. 'Do you think it’s him?'
'I don't know what it is,' Matt replied.
With an annoyed sternness, Alison piped in directly at Kristi, 'I've seen his body, Gregory is dea…'
'Don't try patronizing me with that holier-I-know-best-crap! If you've seen his body, where is it?' she screamed back.
'Look,' Jennifer interrupted, trying to take charge, 'There's a draft coming from down there, it must be a way out, right?' No one answered her. 'We're not getting out up here, so let's just go down and try and get out that way.'
'Yeah, but that's just what he wants, Red.' Kristi smirked.
'We don't know what he wants, or what's going on. We just need to try and get the hell out of this place,' Jennifer replied.
'I think we should mom, it makes sense,' Kelly added, Kristi giving her daughter the evil eye for siding against her.
'Have you all got phones with flashlights?' Matt asked. They nodded, 'Good. At least they're good for something up here.'
'Let's just get some stuff together, before we go down there, just in case,' Jennifer suggested.
'Like what?' Alison asked.
'Weapons. Something to defend ourselves if your hero — "The Amazing Undead Man", decides to pop his head out,' Kristi snapped, bending down and picking up the iron candelabra. 'Something…just in case we have to smash his goddam face in.'
Alison gasped at the woman's brute crudeness; an expression that brought a smile to Kristi's face.
'Yeah, what can we take with us?' Alex agreed. 'I'm not going down there and wandering around in the dark without some kind of weapon.'
'Get some of the wood from those broken benches, anything sharp and pointed.'
Alex picked through the wreckage of the benches he and Matt had destroyed, looking for anything that could be brandished in defence.
Matt saw that Jennifer was standing underneath the projector that was still ejected from its hole in the wall, trying to figure a way out to reach up to it. As he walked over to her, she felt his presence and turned to stare into his face, staring into his eyes, feeling he was on the same page as her, feeling that he was maybe the only one she could trust.
'That,' she said pointing at the projector, 'that's got a bulb in it. If we get that down we can power it from the battery inverter I spotted under that control panel.'
Pouting out his bottom lip, he nodded in agreement,
'Give me a lift up?' she asked.
'Go for it.'
Leaning against the cold marble wall, he crossed his fingers and cupped his hands; Jennifer popped her right foot into it, held onto his shoulders and quickly studied his face before on the count of three, he bolted her straight up.
Perched in Matt's palm, she reached into the hole behind the projector and pulled its power cord taught, feeling its grip into an unseen socket in the darkness beyond it. With a good tug and a quick frazzle of electricity, she pulled it out allowing the projector to move freely again.
Losing her balance, she jumped backwards down to the floor with projector in hand, stumbling as she did.
'Whoa, you okay?' he asked.
'Yeah fine,' she replied. 'Formal shoes: give me a pair of Converse any day.'
'Tell me about it,' he sighed.
She inspected him a moment longer, staring into his eyes again. She hadn't been this close to a man since her encounter with Keith Connors. Matt was attractive, but that part of her brain that connected the human want of companionship to the sexual drive of her libido had been frozen solid for over a year. Even though a twinge of attraction had sparked in her, she suppressed it, squashing it like a bug in a cheap apartment.
She turned away from him, fetching the 12 volt battery and inverter, plugging the projector into it, hoping her plan would work as she flipped the on switch. The bright bulb exploded light across the cold marble floor as the chugging rattle of the small motor exploded to life with the battery's current.
She tried to ignore the worry that was burning in her bones about this situation; keeping the clear-headed almost robot-like demeanour she had for dealing with problems in check. Tried to concentrate on what was important right now: their escape. Get the lights, get some protection, get down in that coffin, find where that breeze is coming from and get out of here, away from these people.
Extending the strap on her briefcase, she swung it over her shoulder, keeping months of hard work safely on her person. Her real problems were far away from here. Fixing up the business, fixing what her parents had left for her. Now jobless, that too was another problem. She had hoped her dear old friend Mr. Blitzer might have left her part of his nest egg, something out of guilt, or something out of niceness — whatever, just something she could use on the road to repairing her fractured life.
She sighed at such dreamy solutions; all he had left her was this: more problems. These problems were good though; these problems were solvable, it was simple. Kristi was right: it was a puzzle, a mystery. Now all she had to do was make the right decisions and getting out of here would be a cakewalk.
But then there was that other thing, the thing she believed in for better or worse that could deviate any situation and its course: chance. Had this all been a chance? A random occurrence of events? Or was it an orchestrated thing she and her follow attendees were being led through like marionettes? Prescribed and scripted.
She looked at the group as she flipped the projector on and off again, just checking it was working; then taking its power lead, she wrapped it around itself and the battery, attaching the two to each other with its cord. It was a cumbersome, rudimentary way of doing so, but
it worked — it had to work.
Cakewalk, she thought, looking at Kristi and her candelabra, Matt and Alex with two sharped planks; both passing out another two to Alison who accepted and the priest who didn't.
Kelly stared back at Jennifer, her child's innocence turning into a friendly smile, one with tension and fear behind her beaming eyes.
Kristi took the priest's unwanted wooden shard from Alex and slapped it into Kelly's chest, making her grab it, arming her child for an apparent confrontation with her un-dead ex-husband.
'Yeah, cakewalk,' Jennifer whispered. Looking at the motley crew of funeral attendees, another pang fired through her from the tattoo, the skin around the devil's face inflaming. 'What?' she whispered, licking her fingers and applying spittle to its soreness.
She carried the projector and battery back to the coffin. Everyone, well dressed and armed, stood around the wooden box, staring into its black hole.
Matt, putting his sharpened plank in the coffin, lifted his right leg in, down onto the first rung of the ladder. Then, holding on to the lip of the coffin, he moved round and began to lower himself down into the dark hole.
'Be careful,' Alison gasped, holding her hand to her face.
From where Jennifer stood, this image was a surreal sight. The one seemingly level headed person of the group, disappeared down into the open wooden box, slipping away into the dark shadows below, as if willingly stepping into a black pool of death.
'You okay?' Alex called.
'Yeah. As you come down, watch the first step. Let me go all the way down and check it out,' Matt replied.
Alex nodded.
Kelly looked at her mom. 'He's brave going in there.'
'You better start being brave too kid, we're next,' Kristi said, coldly.
'Are you sure you're okay going down there?' the priest asked Alison.
'Yes, fine, I'm just a little… frightened,' she replied.
Kristi smiled at them both. 'Come on milk sops, time to get your hands dirty.' Now that the others were finding this entire bizarre experience a bad one, Kristi seemed to find a little happiness in it for herself.
Cakewalk, Jennifer thought. Yep, a real cakewalk.
They stood around the open mouth of the casket, its icy draft of breath reaching out to touch their skin in goose bumping ripples. Matt's shoes clunked and clanked on the unseen ladder, echoing around the chamber below and up towards them, gradually getting fainter as they descended. After a minute the noises stopped, and the group all gathered closer to the hole.
'Matt, you okay? What's down there?' Jennifer called.
'Can you see anything, Matt?' Alex added.
From below there was silence; then the beam of his phone fired up the dirt shaft.
'Yeah, I'm okay. It's a shorter drop than I thought it would be, it looks like… catacombs, running under the church. It's cold, there's definitely a breeze getting in from somewhere.'
'Shall we come down?' the priest asked with a twinge of terror in his voice.
'Yeah, come down, safety in numbers. I need more light down here. I'll wait at the bottom. One at a time, take it easy and you'll be fine.'
'Okay, who's next?' Alex asked.
Kristi fed down the iron candelabra into the open mouth. 'Hey, watch it, I'm dropping this thing down: one, two, three,' she dropped the iron rod that after a couple of seconds hit the ground with a dull thud. 'And these too.' She yelled slipping off her stilettos and dropping them down.
She swung her impressive legs down the hole and looked at Kelly as she did. 'You're up next kid. I'll help you down,' she said with a wink. Finding the embedded first rung of the ladder, its roughness reached through her stocking covered foot. One by one they descended into the catacombs, leaving Jennifer last. Taking a last look around the eerie empty church, a place now without the presence of the others that every shadow and corner held as many macabre mysteries as the hole below. A shiver crawled down her spine; she took off her jacket, spinning it round like a lasso until it tightened and entwined like a rope then looped it through the projector's handle, knotted it and hung the clumsy machine over her shoulder.
Climbing down into the crypt, her imagination running in over drive, fueled by the darkness around her, unaware that, as she climbed down the ladder, another unseen electronic eye — this time mounted in the far end of the coffin, covered with a thin layer of sheet fabric — had also counted to seven. The magic number that would bring the hidden hydraulic arms underneath the coffin's plush material down, trapping them, unable to escape the cold blackness below.
CHAPTER 12
One step at a time, Jennifer moved down into the dark, claustrophobic dirt tunnel; her heart gained momentum as a drizzle of fear filled sweat formed over her body like a cocoon. She held her breath until her feet met the ground at the bottom of the ladder, and then exhaled deeply in a trembling rush of air. Frozen to the spot, gaining her bearings, she looked at the group standing side-by-side, staring at their phones; they looked no different from any group of subterranean dwellers you would see on the LA metro. But with their flash light functions on, they used their phones to look into the morbid darkness that wrapped around them.
The ticking Matt had heard was now an amplified reverberation around the chamber, it made Jennifer's muscles jump with its rhythm and repetition. For a moment, a familiarity washed over her, the cool air moving around her, the clock's ticking tempo in her ears; she closed her eyes and her surroundings transmuted from the dark dank catacombs under the Earth, back to the atmosphere of Blitzer's funeral parlour. The two places shared the same soundtrack, the same dank feel and the same oppressive quality. With eyes closed they could be one and the same.
Matt spoke, and she opened her eyes. 'Can you feel that draft?'
'Yeah,' she replied. 'Feels like it's coming…' Looking around in the limited light, her eyes adjusting, she realized there were three huge stone archways surrounding her, 'from down one of those?' she stumbled pointing out to the arches. Everyone aimed their small lights up to illuminate them.
'Jesus… how big is this place?' observed Alex, the denseness of the dark causing him to yell out.
Kelly licked a finger and held it the air. 'You can't tell which arch the draft’s coming from.' The draft of air made the hairs on Jennifer's arm stiffen with ghostly cold. The girl was right; it felt like it was silently circulating through all of them.
'Well, we'll just have to find which one feels strongest, then explore.' Alison added, 'surely that would mean there's an entrance out of here if the air flow is stronger in one of them?'
The priest put his hands out. 'It feels like it’s just circulating. A draft’s getting in here from somewhere, but I can't tell where.'
'That's great,' Kristi said with a roll of her eyes.
'It feels so clammy, it’s creepy,' Kelly said, a shiver spearing up her spine.
They all began to look around the dank space, random beams of light from their phones bouncing off either almost black dirt earth walls, or vanishing down the seemingly long endless mist filled passages into bleak nothingness.
The beam of Kelly's phone, roaming around the room, suddenly found the answer to the loud, endless ticking. 'Look!' the girl exclaimed, making the others spin around to see what she had found. Embedded above them in the ceiling, were hundreds upon hundreds of clocks: bedside alarm clocks, cuckoo clocks, faces of buried Grandfather clocks; pocket watches, antique clocks, new clocks. The swaying eyes and tail of a Kit Kat clock and a kid's Mickey Mouse alarm clock with his oversized gloved white hands pointing towards the eight and the nine. All ticking, all in synch, all showing the same time: eight forty-five. Each of them packed into the earth; all facing out, second hands ticking or pendulums swinging.
'What the hell is going on here?' Matt said as he stepped next to Kelly.
'There are hundreds of them,' she answered in astonishment.
Jennifer shook her head. 'I don't get it.'
Kristi, used to seeing such junk
around the home she'd shared with Blitzer, was taken aback by the sheer volume and absurdness of the ceiling full of ticking, clanking clocks.
'Hey!' Alex yelled, 'look at this, this place is wired.' They turned to his beam of light. There, in its glow and mounted in the moist dirt wall, was a single white power cable like a long thin tapeworm half burrowed into the earth.
Kristi and Kelly added their phone's conical beams to his, making the overall illumination grow; highlighting the half-buried, white electrical lead snaking in-between more wall bound clocks. They moved their beams, following the wire in either direction; Kristi, moving quicker and more sporadic, flitted her light around the claustrophobic dirt walls revealing the answer they had been looking for.
'I think we have light,' she said. There attached to the end of the slinking cable nailed to a piece of decaying wood, primitively placed in a small dug out in the earth, was a fingerprint-encrusted white light switch.
She flipped it and immediately it illuminated strings of small white lights — like Christmas lights — that popped on in the thick cobwebs overhead, illuminating the clock faces like ticking glass baubles. Buzzing fluorescent strip lights came to life either side of the lengths of the arched tunnels. Each passage was lined with more clocks, their faces lit from beneath by the strip lights, the radiance like a flashlight under someone's chin who was telling a ghost story on Halloween night.
'Well this just got easier. We better turn these off.' Alex put his phone in his pocket. 'Who knows how long this lighting's going to last? Hopefully it's buzzed into the main grid. But it might be on batteries or a generator like that control panel up there.' Peering into the deep horizon of each of the three tunnels, he added, 'So where the hell are we going to go? Which one should we pick?'
Suddenly, with a mechanical clanking, the limited amount of light pouring in from the open coffin lid above them began to dissipate, shrinking away from the laddered earth shaft. 'Shit, the coffin is closing!' Jennifer shouted; dropping the projector down, and holding her phone's flashlight up in front of her, just as a clasping, clamping sound ricocheted down towards them.