Are You Haunted (part forty-six)

Are You Haunted

(part forty-six)

He rolled his tie and stuck it in a jacket pocket. He folded the jacket and placed it on a mossy patch. He untucked and unbuttoned, and took off his clean white shirt. He folded this and laid it on top of the jacket.

There was nothing in the tunnel. No hidden cash, no damning cache of papers…

Tovey ought to know it already.

Powell’s belt caught as he eased through the vent—lucky, because the drop was slight; he would have come down hard on his knees. He squatted on the tunnel floor and looked up.

Tovey handed the flashlight without thanks or advice.

Then moved out of view. “Kenzie, you okay for a minute?”

“Keep there and wait,” Powell said.

And through the passage of the minute Tovey had asked for, he heard voices, a cadence of conversation. He worked around on his heels. The tunnel showed box-shaped, somewhere between four and five feet, ceiling supported by steel beams. Its builders had negotiated the hill using canted gangways and steeper ramps. Powell bent with a hand flat against the wall, seeing well enough until the first ramp’s foot.

He switched on the flashlight.

Nothing hazardous loomed.

Conserving batteries, he switched it off, and crept on in darkness. The next ramp should take him below Mill Road. He could hear faint plinks, echoing more insistently as he approached the next gangway.

His shoe came down with a splash. Exercising great care, Powell pulled the light from his belt, and saw what he’d expected, standing water. The floor was packed earth and might be mush underneath. The water could have been here for years.

But along the left was a brick ledge, a sort of buttress. He tightened his belt an extra notch over the flashlight, and switched it off.

Time seemed unending, while his fingers groped for any depression, and his feet slid from groove to groove. He began to feel a deepening of the light’s absence, the cessation of a noise not apparent until this silence.

Now at last a ramp went up. He had gone under the road; he was done with the water. The wreckage of the mill was how close…?

His fingers skidded on something gummy. A vague odor, indefinably loathsome, was released by his touch. He moved another few feet in darkness.

But overtaken by a tense disquietude, he pulled out the flashlight, shined it on the floor and the walls. Bringing the light close to the bricks, he saw bubbles pimple the glaze. Some ahead were denuded of glaze altogether, their surfaces crazed with fissures.

45

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part forty-seven)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)