Creatures

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Beth and I closed the window to cover his tracks, and then we ran further into the house, toward the back where the kitchens were.

We avoided the adults working there and slipped into the basement through the kitchen’s backstairs. This part of the massive basement was used to store food and cooking goods. The gymnasium section was far away at the other end of the mansion under the dormitories.

“How long?” I asked Beth. The first hallway in this part of the basement was dingy and dark. A single, naked 25 watt bulb hung down from the ceiling and glowed with yellowy light. We were surrounded by musty crates of vegetables and canned goods. The place had an earthy smell to it, the smell of dust and mold. She snapped on her tiny flashlight, examining her watch. I had neither.

“Five minutes, maybe less.”

I chose a passage at random and we ran into the darkness.

For several hours, no one came near. I imagined them combing through the attic, finding nothing.

“I hope they aren’t chasing Jake in the woods,” said Beth in a whisper. I looked at her, but could barely make out her shape in the darkness. I’d been thinking the same thing.

“He’ll be okay,” I said without much conviction.

“Why is your grandfather doing this? Why is he dividing up the family and putting us against one another?”

I shrugged. “We’ve always been a competitive bunch,” I said. “But this is different. I guess he thinks this is what he needs to do to make us tough.”

“So this is all about trying to show him how tough you are? This whole scary game of hide and seek, is just about impressing the old man?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Like I told you back on the bus, we are not normal people here in Camden.”

“I remember that, like a dream from a year ago. I had no idea.”

There were some thumping steps on the ceiling above us. I waved for Beth to be quiet. The steps slowed, and then stopped. It seemed like they were directly above us, perhaps in some hallway.

“What do you…?” began Beth, but I shushed her.

The steps began again, slowly moving above us.

“They can’t hear us down here,” hissed Beth in my ear.

“Those might not be human ears listening,” I hissed back, putting a finger to her lips.

We listened for perhaps thirty seconds. Nothing.

Then, suddenly, the steps started thumping again, fast this time.

“Come on,” I said, grabbing Beth’s hand and pulling her out into the hallway.

“You think they heard us?”

“I think so, we need to move.”

Somewhere in the distance we heard a door creak open and slam. Beth squeezed my hand. The hounds had come down into the basement.

So we ran again. We traveled deeper into the basement. I came to realize as we stumbled about in the dusty underworld that the mansion’s basement was fully as big as the main floor of the mansion.

Then we found the stone steps. They led down further into the ground. A single dim light bulb hung down on a wire. It looked very old, as if electric lights had been a new idea when it had been installed. I wondered how many decades it had hung there. I reached up and twisted the hot bulb, unscrewing it just enough that it went out quietly.

“What’s down those steps?” asked Beth in the heavy darkness.

“We’re going to find out,” I said, pulling her after me as we went down the steps. I hadn’t even known there were deeper levels, but I didn’t want to tell Beth that now.

The second level down was much older than the first. Instead of walls that were flat concrete, the walls here were mortar and stone. The stones weren’t bricks either, but real stones with rounded corners, they looked and felt smooth like river rocks to me. We found a lantern near the stairway with Beth’s tiny flashlight. There were very old wooden matches with the lantern. After burning out half the box of matches and singeing my fingers, I managed to get the lantern to light.

“Good,” breathed Beth when yellowy light splashed and flickered over the walls. “The batteries in my flashlight wouldn’t have lasted much longer.”

I nodded and held the lantern up to look closely at the space we were in. There were leather straps and things hanging on the walls. Small rooms built of wood were here and there around the dusty interior.

“This must have been for animals,” said Beth. “That’s a bridle, and there’s a yoke, like for oxen.”

“Yes,” I said, “I get it, they must have kept animals down here years ago. But why keep them underground?”

“I know in cold places they did that, like Scandinavia,” said Beth. “To keep the animals warm, the lower levels of a big house were for the cattle and horses in the winter.”

“Wouldn’t have been much fun for the animals,” I said.

“Nor the people caring for them, either,” said Beth.

I nodded, wondering how old the mansion really was. It had to be a century old, maybe two centuries. As we explored the stables, I worried that we might find something horrible, something that I didn’t want Beth to see. The adults had whispered about the old days, and I knew that the people of Camden hadn’t always been completely civilized. This basement seemed like just the kind of place where dark secrets would be hidden.

But all we found were empty storerooms and empty animal stalls. There were pitchforks and shovels and wheelbarrows and horseshoes.

Eventually, we found more stone steps leading further down into the Earth. We both stared at these steps and the ancient wooden door at the bottom. The door was obviously far older than anything I’d seen in the mansion before. It looked medieval. It was made of heavy dark wood. The thick, crudely cut wood planks were held together with rusty metal straps. There was no doorknob. Instead, a massive ring of black iron the size of a large man’s hand served the purpose.

Beth hugged up against me as we looked down the steps at that closed door. “What’s down there?” asked Beth.

“I have no idea.”‘

“I don’t like the look of it.”

I shook my head. “Me either. I feel like we are going back a century in time with each level we go down.”

We heard sounds back far behind us. They echoed from the stone walls. It was the sound of voices, and footsteps. I found a loop of thick rope and dropped it on the stone steps that led down to the ancient door. I had the beginnings of an idea.

I took a step downward, reaching toward the huge iron ring. Beth held me back.

“If we go down there Connor,” said Beth in my ear. “Eventually, we will run out of levels, and we won’t have any way to go back up. We’ll be trapped down there.”

“Maybe,” I said, “But I’ve got a plan.”