Are You Haunted (part forty-eight)

Are You Haunted

(part forty-eight)

Again reaching the bottom of the second ramp, he risked the flashlight, and saw the water’s perfect mirror quiver in response to a wave of impact, a truck passing overhead. One he hadn’t quite heard.

Heel to toe, he walked back up. Pellets began to crunch under his shoes. He squatted, and rolled a piece with his thumb…

They were chunks of dirt, scattering the floor just at the wall’s edge.

He drew his hands along the high part of the wall; then, troubled at finding it restored, touched the grid of the grate. He switched on the beam and it died at once. He pushed his fingers through and felt a covering of cold metal.

He tried, anyway. He shoved with both hands and all his strength; gave up at last, with a sort of wonder. They had bolted the grate back into place. They had added some other thing that blocked the light. He weighed the possibility of a well-intended mistake, and could not believe in it. Tovey had said he’d be gone for a minute. Two others had been speaking close by.

Powell patted the wall, taking himself along in utter darkness, up the next ramp, making for the Drybrook cellar, his only hope.

He had trusted Lloyd Guy and Mrs. Drybrook…even to a point, had trusted Lettie. He had put up with Tovey for Isobel’s sake, followed Tovey’s instructions, come down into this tunnel…

But he had not believed anyone would target someone who had nothing to do with them, who was no threat to them, who wanted nothing from them, who meant them no harm. He had not believed anyone would do this; he had not foreseen it, and likely enough, he would not survive it.

He saw that disorientation would be death. He might claw at brick until the flesh of his hands was torn to the bone, and if he’d got himself misdirected, he would flail in vain—at the indifferent hillside, rather than the cellar wall.

Yet the highest ramp did not end as Powell had envisioned…it seemed to open into a chamber. Feeling out the dimensions of a doorway, he groped to an adjacent door. This cracked an inch, and his fingers found a mound of dirt barricading the way.

His panic grew. He came to the room’s terminal wall and felt a waft of air, another exit only a foot high, built rough with the brick-ends exposed. He reached in, and couldn’t tell by the air’s temperature whether this was a tunnel, or a pit for supplies.

This underground warren had been designed for holing up, for withstanding some prolonged enemy assault. They had done a thorough job crafting its intricacies, and Powell would never know which wall was the right wall.

“Who is that?”

“Rohdl!”

47

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part forty-nine)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)