From the author of Black City Skyline and Darker Horizons, the Servante of Darkness Blog is proud to present a new story by Barry Lee Dejasu, master of mind horror. This is a preview look at Emergent, where darkness confronts a boy's imagination with curious foreboding. Enjoy the creepiness.
Anthony Servante
Emergent
Mose regretted not noticing the pattern sooner. He would ultimately blame his sophomore year of high school, which was only slightly more tolerable than the previous one, although the hours of homework waged a constant battle against the armies of superheroes, slashers, and science fiction tales that filled his TV screen and all the paperbacks and comics that crowded his room. But in a way, he also might not have noticed the pattern had it not been for all that homework.
After losing what could’ve been ten minutes or an hour trying to focus on a five-page writing assignment for his English class, he’d heard raised voices from outside his window and stood up over his cluttered desk to see his mother stepping across the yard to Mrs. Ferguson’s unkempt hedges, beyond which the widowed neighbor stood with her arms crossed.
He couldn’t quite hear them at first, but saw Mrs. Ferguson twist her torso and gesture her arm back toward her house, then pointed down and shook her head. Not wanting to draw attention to himself, if only so his mother wouldn’t realize he was disregarding his homework, he sat back in his chair and carefully placed his elbows on the desk to give him leverage as he used his upturned fingertips to pull the window up. The fall air and the conversation drifted in.
Since her husband had died, Mrs. Ferguson had become closer with his mom, but their conversations could relieve her grief only so much. She had found a remedy for her loneliness in the form of an orange cat she named, oddly, Clarence—who was the subject of today’s conversation.
Mose’s eyebrows raised with concern. Had the cat gotten out? Outdoor pets were constantly under threat from rural predators, as there were five thousand acres of forest surrounding the perimeter of the town—and although Mose didn’t know what an acre was, five thousand was a big enough number for him to imagine impossible amounts of trees, bushes, hills, thickets, caves, and other places in which unseen hunters could lurk. Fortunately, however, although Clarence had not been endangered by the forest, Mrs. Ferguson was nevertheless very scared.
For the better part of three days, Clarence had found the ultimate hiding place in her basement, where a section of the old house’s foundation had crumbled away to expose the earth itself beyond. A space three feet wide but less than a foot high yawned open at the top of the raw ground, traveling along the floorboards of her living room before a sharp turn in the craggy bedrock failed the farthest reach of her flashlight. She’d been an hour late to work the Friday before, after her morning coffee had been interrupted by muffled meows beneath her feet. The sole benefit of her failed attempts to coax a reluctant Clarence to come back out from the de facto crawlspace had been that she’d waited out most of the morning rush hour to work. She’d left a trail of several bowls of cat food leading from the crawlspace, along the basement floor to the stairs, and back into the light and warmth of her home, but upon her return that evening, there’d been no sign of the explorer. She’d spent the better part of that night and the subsequent weekend calling to him, baiting him with toys and treats and an assortment of vocal pitches and volumes, but there was no sign of Clarence. It was only after she’d come to the sickening resignation of losing her second companion in a row that the little jerk had reappeared, sporting only dust on his whiskers to chronicle his travels. After that, she’d been keeping the basement door closed.
So perplexed was Mrs. Ferguson as to where Clarence might’ve gone that she even hypothesized to Mose’s mother that perhaps he’d somehow wound up beneath the street—which his mother was quick to dismiss as too wild a notion to make any sense. But the question remained—where had the cat gone? What did it mean that the basement had such an expansive appendage to its structure? And, most unsettling of all to her, to the point that she’d avoided entering the basement again after the incident—if a small animal could disappear into such a space, who was to say that others might not come through it, into her home?
That afternoon, Mrs. Ferguson had seen Mose’s mother working in her garden and came to ask if she knew of any contractors who might be able to work on sealing up the unintentional branch of her basement. But while the conversation had continued from there, Mose was unable to focus upon the words, much less his homework.
He tried to envision how there could be a space big enough under Mrs. Ferguson’s house inside which a cat could disappear for several days. Did that mean that her house was sitting on top of a cave? Unlikely, he knew—both of their houses were along a busy road that connected directly to a highway, and given all the big granite boulders that pockmarked their lawns and from which early settlers had built the many stone walls throughout the region, there was no way the ground was stable enough to support houses if there was some massive space beneath them.
The thought was becoming too convoluted for his brain to sufficiently digest, and he soon shrugged it off and returned to filling out the second page of his explanation as to why H. G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” was an example of great English literature.
He didn’t think of the mystery beneath Mrs. Ferguson’s house again until later that semester, when being shown a slideshow about the Underground Railroad for a U.S. History report. With many people literally fleeing underground via secret passageways, he recalled how Clarence had somehow managed to embark upon a several-day journey beneath the floorboards—and then he perked up in the darkened classroom, his mouth open in a silent gasp.
It hadn’t been a cave that the cat had discovered—no, the space beneath Mrs. Ferguson’s house was undoubtedly a tunnel.
But where could a tunnel lead beneath a sleepy town such as theirs? He highly doubted that it led all the way up to Canada. What was more, hadn’t Mrs. Ferguson said that the tunnel was very tight? Very unlikely, too, people had utilized it. If anything, it had to be a natural structure—one which led not to the path of the Underground Railroad, but a new set of questions.
How long was the tunnel? Did it continue along the substrate beneath the neighboring houses, or their yards, or even the roads? Did it angle down and burrow deep into the earth? Obviously, if the latter was the case, Clarence might’ve had a harder time returning home, so any angles in the tunnel had to be somewhat even or gentle in their slopes and twists. And more obviously, it couldn’t be too long, or else the cat may have still been down there, a couple of months later.
So, in other words, the tunnel either terminated at a dead end of some sort, or Clarence had given up his travels and returned, and that could only mean one thing—it was much, much longer than Mose had originally thought it was.
Only several brief times did he entertain the notion of asking Mrs. Ferguson if he could check out the tunnel entrance beneath her house, but he knew how absurd such a question would sound to her and his mother, as well as how completely unprepared he would be to attempt such an exploration. No, if he were to determine the nature of the tunnel, he would have to find a different means of surveying it.
In the days following his realization, he tried to sketch the layout of New Meadow Road, and the placements of his house, Mrs. Ferguson’s, and the others that he could think of, but there were only so many unscaled lines, shapes, and squiggles that he could trace on notepad pages before scribbling them out and, in one instance, tore it off of the metal spirals, crumbled it up, and threw it into the crevasse between his nightstand and desk. He knew he needed a map, but even then, what good would that do if he had no idea where the tunnel even initially led?
Even so, at school the following week, he printed off a couple of copies of an online map of the general area surrounding his house, in varying levels of magnification and scale. Taking them home, he made as few pen markings as possible, trying to plot out the correlations of Mrs. Ferguson’s basement, where the break in the foundation was, and which direction the tunnel would have to go in order to pass beneath the street, as she’d hypothesized.
He took into consideration the unlikelihood that the tunnel burrowed steeply, which was a relief on his imagination. The only directions, then, that he would have to map out were not down, or up, but north, south, east, or west, which he marked out in red arrows in a rough compass surrounding the area of Mrs. Ferguson’s house.
But his research did have to come to a premature—though temporary—end, for that week was midterms, and he didn’t need his mother to remind him of how important those were. It would only be a matter of time before the semester’s real work began, between a string of algebra tests, a reading assignment for English, and a number of other daily tasks.
Mose had friends, at least in that there were people with whom he regularly chatted and shared a laugh over something stupid. However, his daily returns home were usually followed with fascinated excursions into the concepts of alien worlds—a facet of his behavior which all too soon would become more apparent than ever in the days following the news that had broken on the other side of town.
The lives of the townsfolk were so inexorably intertwined that anyone could learn what someone else had had for dinner the night before just by asking a neighbor across the street. By that principle, Mose’s mother had heard of a man who’d been walking his dogs the morning before, when the two canines sharply stepped off the sidewalk and began barking at the yard beyond, but upon following their line of sight, the man was unable to identify the object of their attention, and attempted to reel them back. However, he’d then heard something rustling and snapping branches, and the dogs’ barking resumed, louder and more tensely. The man froze when he saw something large and brown rise into view beyond the woodline behind the house there. Fearing it was a bear, he was about to hurry the dogs to safety, when the brown shape seemed to drop back out of view as quickly as it had appeared. Staring after it, he watched another blur of movement, and then another, and realized that the brown shapes were in fact big chunks of soil being tossed up in the air, displaced by something burrowing into the ground.
The man never saw the burrowing culprit, and had avoided walking along that street this morning. But when Mose’s mother mentioned the strange sight to him, he calmly inquired as to where this might’ve been, in the interest of avoiding it, himself—not that he was allowed to travel beyond their yard unsupervised, but he was still guardedly curious. He retained the memory of the stretch of road that she mentioned, then quietly examined his maps later that evening.
Mose figured that if a man standing by the road could witness dirt being dug up and tossed into the air all the way from the road, the odds were good that the animal doing it was very strong—and large. But more importantly, why was it digging so frantically?
A subconscious thought occurred to him while at one point hearing his mother go into the bathroom, close the door, then emerge a few minutes later. The man had only seen the displaced earth being thrown into the air, and not the thing doing the digging. Therefore, it made sense that perhaps the creature had in fact been digging out of the ground!
The distance between Mrs. Ferguson’s house and the street where the man had seen the burrower was considerable—and although he’d not thought to jot down any indication of the scale on the map, he nonetheless figured it had to be two, maybe three, miles’ distance. He very nearly drew a line between them, then paused, the nub of his pen hovering above the paper.
Occurrences are little more than the perception of individual points drawn on a canvas of two dimensions—but with each repetition, the linear realization of significance gains weight. Dots become lines, and lines become paths, upon which the journey embarks.
Mose knew then that that these two instances were not only related, but that they were highly unlikely to be isolated. There had to have been others waiting to be identified, and very well could—or, he was sure, would—still be more to come.
He then lowered his pen and sat back, staring at the two points of the map. He’d found a pattern. He was tracing a design. He’d begun drawing a map.
And, beneath the pattern, the design, the map—really, the town itself—something strange was unfolding.
He didn’t have to wait long before discovering the next point, now that he knew to be on the lookout. After a heavy thunderstorm had come through for the better part of a day, the front half of a pickup truck had plunged into a bed-sized hole in the asphalt on a road halfway across town. The unlucky driver had been shaken but unharmed, and following the wide-eyed stare at the TV as a local news channel aired the story before him and his mother, to his map Mose went.
What was quickly deemed a gas leak came next, in front of a couple of businesses near one of the highways that cut through town. A section of the sidewalk had cracked open, releasing yellowish-white plumes of noxious-smelling mist, and although it had been quickly contained, one of the subsequent online reports had alluded that there was not a gas line running through that area of the ground.
A series of strange sounds, ranging from rumbles to cracks to earthly groans and gurgles, had caught the attention of a group of students who’d skipped school one afternoon. They’d been driving along a rural road near the Acushnet and New Bedford town lines when they heard the sounds seeming to emanate from all around them, and they had to step out of their car to realize that the sounds were coming from the ground itself. They’d ultimately gotten in trouble for their misdemeanor, even though they had called emergency services about a possible earthquake, which ultimately was not recorded.
The anomalies did not stop with seismic activities—there were also biological ones. A colony of bats erupted up out of an uncharted colony in the middle of a park one afternoon, spreading out in a startling cloud of flaps and squeaks that had sent several people running. There were reports by hunters and nature observers alike of sightings of strange creatures in the state forest. Even Mose himself had spotted something unusual, when several large, black wasps buzzed loudly past him as he and his mother were exiting a grocery store, and he watched as they flew directly, one by one, through the grating of a storm drain and out of view.
More and more the points on the map came, until it began resembling a topographical expanse of black stars, waiting for an imaginative—or intuitive—mind to draw out the suggestive details of a constellation. In an effort to avoid prematurely misidentifying the shape on the map, Mose ended up drawing the points on separate sheets of paper, again and again, until he very nearly had them memorized. And then, he set to work connecting the dots as best as he could, almost a decade after he’d abandoned the developmental activity.
He tried drawing the outlines. The resulting shapes were very crooked—at first, an assortment of irregular polygons with any number of shapes and appendages, which only seemed to grow more confounding the more Mose tried to flatten out their edges.
He attempted to link up certain incidents by type, but this quickly resulted in a mess of overlapping layers that resembled more of a fractured sheet of glass than the intersecting lines of a spiderweb … although he felt that he was beginning to catch glimpses of the larger shape.
With each subsequent reconfiguration of the incidents and the lines there between them, the smaller the pieces of the puzzle became—but what was more significant to him were its sharp edges, and how it began to attain the same markings of preconceived steps as notes on a music sheet. And as notes transformed into a rhythm, so did lines form a harmony—and after a few days of deciphering the music of the pattern, Mose came to plot out the resulting song. His persistence was the instrument for which the piece had been written, and his resulting visualization was the conductor of its performance.
It had no beginning, nor end—at least not to its immediate perception. It spun out in stretches of concentric spirals and expanding twists and turns, a dizzying array of directions that spoke to the naked eye of dead ends and traps—but the dimensions of such a massive warren can be defined as a maze only if the follower loses track of their journey back. For all its complexity, the path was ultimately a ring of interlocking, twisting shapes, each one terminating prematurely the closer to its center they got. The way out was, ultimately, a question of how to proceed inward, and for all the incidents that Mose had already recorded, he knew that they were only the beginning—and its epicenter was somewhere along the roads at the farthest edges of town, where they met the forest.
Of course, with this premise—and promise—of things to come, he had no way of knowing the nature of this emergence. But instincts are powerful for the mystery of their evolutionary origins, and Mose didn’t dare question the uncertain feelings of tension that this mystery had awoken. He had no way of knowing what was buried at the edge of town, but he had no question that time was of the essence.
And, alas, time was another element which he’d not even considered.
He turned not to the map for this layer of research, but to the master list of incidents. Starting with Clarence’s disappearance and ending with the most recent mystery—a discovery of several large, crab-like pincers that had been found in the outpouring rain water of an overfull sewer drain only the day before—Mose’s jaw had stretched wider and wider until his lips could no longer keep his agog realization at bay. They’d been happening with increasing frequency. Whatever was coming, it was nearly here.
If this discovery had taught Mose anything about himself, it was his damnably linear way of thinking, as all humans are designed to be. Given his limited perspective, however, he knew that this was also to his advantage, for although time had been against him, as he’d come to realize the design so late after it had been initiated, space was still on his side—for the intersection of the roads and the forest were not only the epicenter of the pattern…
…they were also not a mile away from the location of his school.
After narrowly escaping a day of needless monotony and tedium, he ducked along the not-very-well-kept secret path into the woods that many an older student would traverse through in the quest for a smoke or other jaunt. Avoiding a long stretch of poison ivy, he followed the path through a small section of forest before emerging onto the main road again, where only an abandoned house stood, only to quickly duck back into the woods when he saw a car waiting in the house’s driveway.
Mose had taken the journey alone, and had nobody to whom he could convey the severe strangeness of this incident. But had he been able to do so, he would have emphasized that the house was so well known for its derelict state that its overgrown property had once been utilized by a science class to launch small rockets. Its walls were crowded with thick layers of vines that seemed to threaten to tear them down to its foundation. Animals had frequently been spotted scuttling or creeping in and out of the hints of doorways, windows, and other entrances that may not have been part of its original design. But one way or another, it had never shown any signs of occupation—and yet the visiting car had been parked so close to the house that it had practically been nestled into the vines, itself.
The car itself was not so much a source of mystery or distress unto itself—except for the mere fact that it appeared at the same time as Mose, for his own journey to the house had been governed by the fact that it was at the linear epicenter of the pattern. If he had shown up at this point to chronicle the nature of the pattern’s forthcoming climax at the same time that this vehicle had done so, either its passengers were also seeking its truth … or it was a truth with which they were already very much familiar.
Mose would spend nearly an hour watching the front of the house from a vantage point in the hidden path. He was uncertain of what to expect, of what he was even seeking—but he ultimately had to return home before his mother got too worried about his absence and began a journey of her own to find him. But he knew that he would return, as soon as he could.
His next day by the house came the following week, as home tasks and weather interruptions kept him away. He nevertheless kept abreast of any unanticipated new developments in town—but the lack of news was not a surprise, nor good news, for it only further confirmed the process of the pattern. He was eager to return to the house, praying that whatever the significance of the presence of the car, it didn’t necessarily have any bearing on the outcome of the pattern.
His prayers were not regarded, nor honored.
Not only had the car returned—another vehicle, a large, grey pickup truck, had also pulled up alongside the house. And upon his reaching the end of the path that afternoon, he not only spotted the two vehicles … he had his first glimpse of the people who’d arrived in them.
There were two men and a woman. The woman and one of the men were dragging large pieces of equipment out of the bed of the truck, and although Mose couldn’t identify any of it, each piece looked heavy and mechanical in nature. They were wearing t-shirts despite the mid-fall weather, and Mose could see their arms and the outlines of their shoulders under the fabric were curved with lean muscles. He only then noticed the absence of the third person, and ducked back behind the shrubs, worrying that he’d be surprised by the man looming high above him, arms crossed over his chest, shaking his head at the young fool who’d been spying on their mysterious operation.
The second man, fortunately, was nowhere to be seen on the hidden path. Mose, relaxing, looked back over to the house. The first man and the woman were carrying the equipment around to the front of the house, and Mose saw the front door was open, and the missing man appeared from inside of it. He looked to them and spoke, his words rendered indistinct by distance and a possible accent, and Mose watched him dab at his face with a dark blue handkerchief that loosely hung from his neck. The woman said something back to him, and he turned and led them into the house.
Mose looked away, his mind racing with questions and hypotheses, but the patch of ground at which his absent gaze stared offered no answers. Surely, there could be no coincidence in the presence of these newcomers to the long-abandoned house, not when the complex flow of events was quickly converging upon this one location. These people had to know of the pattern, then—but what brought about such knowledge? Were they researchers? Scientists? Perhaps they were seeking their own answers to the same enigma, arriving from their own avenues of philosophy and exploration into the unknown anomaly. In fact, they were also looking to the linear-minded “end” of the ever-twisting subterranean mystery that seemed to span beneath the entire township, to determine not only its purpose, but its origins, and its nature.
And what, exactly, were they hoping to find, anyway? There had to be a network of tunnels—of this much, Mose was most certain. Perhaps the house had been converted as an entrance into them, complete with an elevator to go down into the oversized warren—but that suggested the spaces were human-made, and that, Mose was also certain, was not the case.
Whatever had dug the tunnels had to be strong enough to burrow for miles and miles through substrate and bedrock alike. He briefly imagined the burrowers as giant moles, although that wouldn’t explain the strange gases leaking from the ground, nor the wasps, nor the bats—
Mose looked away, his gaze wandering over browning leaves and red berries, among which a couple of insects flitted and crawled. Several yards away, a squirrel hopped and undulated toward a tree. In the distance, a bird chirped. Mose saw and heard all of these things, and yet his attention was far away and far below them all.
An entire ecosystem, he reasoned, was likely at work in the tunnels, beside whatever burrowers had dug them. The wasps might have made their nest down there amidst hardened mud. The fumes that had escaped may well have not been gases, but more something more like clouds of spores ejected from subterranean fungi, disturbed by jumbled sets of multi-jointed limbs, each terminating in crustaceous pincers, trailed through holes burrowed into the walls. Massive chilopods, their segmented lengths rippling with twin rows of moving appendages, scuttled through like subway trains. Pale, humanoid creatures ducked and crept through the crooked passages of gravel and dirt like the Morlocks of H.G. Wells’ story, but far more primitive, far less advanced—and far more feral. And beneath them all, in a place so deep and dark that light had forgotten how to illuminate anything, something so much bigger, so much more massive spanned, and pulsed, and beathed…
Mose thought of the bats that had flown out of their hidden cave, and how the only explanation for their daytime exit was that they’d been scared out. He thought of the man’s dogs, and how fiercely they’d responded to the burrower in the forest. He thought of the sinkhole, and how it had almost swallowed an entire car, driver and all. He thought of the hole that started it all, leading directly beneath Mrs. Ferguson’s house.
Was this encroaching, subterranean environment posing some kind of ecological threat to the town? Or even, for all he knew, to the entire surface world?
Perhaps the people inside the house knew the answer to this, and perhaps not. But given their equipment, perhaps they already knew what to expect in this excursion. Perhaps they knew what was coming—but what did they hope to achieve, as a result? What did they know, or expect, to find? To uncover? Maybe even to welcome?
Even so, Mose had to remind himself that he didn’t actually know the intentions of these newcomers, but he was in no position to casually ask them what they were doing. They would likely disguise their answers with misdirection over his age or knowledge, and that was if they even responded to his inquiries at all. And, what was more, they had no reason to trust an outsider with the knowledge of their tasks at all—and given that logic, there were any number of possible other means of responding that might be less than comfortable for Mose to handle.
The hour was against him, and the daylight was beginning to retreat. His mother would be waiting for him, and he couldn’t very well make a habit of tardy returns after school without explanation. As with every other step of his journey to decipher the nature of the pattern, Mose knew that he had to make a plan.
Which was exactly what he did.
He worked away in his notebooks and printed maps for a couple of days straight, waking up in the middle of the night a few times to jot down ideas that had crowded out the notion of sleep from his restless brain. He would have to explore a number of potential resources in order to proceed with the plan, and although time was of the essence, it was also not on his side—but even the straightest and most depended-upon roads sometimes require turns, dips, rises, and angles in order to properly allow voyagers to navigate a distance. Shortcuts are inevitable, however infrequent they may be.
And so, with what he determined was a week’s time available to him to prepare, he exhaustedly gathered what he could for the desperate but crucial journey that he was going to have to make—into the tunnels themselves.
Working flashlights and batteries were the most crucial items. Although he had no access to hard hats, his late father had once given him a pith helmet when he was younger, dubbing him Sergeant Cutter, a reference Mose had never understood, and fortunately it still fit. He retrieved several reinforced-plastic pads for carpentry from the garage, and although they were likely meant to fit on knees, he managed to uncomfortably secure them to his shoulders. He’d also owned a compass since he could first remember, and many an instance of uncertain reverence finally came to practical fruition as he hefted it, watching the wobbling disc of lines find its point of focus. And although the stained denim coveralls, thick workers’ boots, and leather gloves that he’d dug out from a box in a closet were far from impenetrable—and all a bit loose—he imagined that the stingers of wasps or the pincers of crabs would have a tough time breaking through to his skin.
From the basement, he also produced a strong metal cane, its sharply-angled handle sturdy under all of the weight he could put upon it. He briefly thought of the trembling figure that had once hobbled over it, and the confident wink that belied the weakened shell—the same wink that he’d seen every day of his life up until those frightful months of pain and then ultimate nothingness. Fighting back tears, Mose squeezed the cane, his inventory complete.
He didn’t bother looking at himself in the hallway mirror between the bathroom and his mother’s room, not only to avoid accidentally invoking her scrutiny, but because he knew full well how ridiculous he no doubt looked. But his preparations had not been done with fashion in mind—only function. He instead packed everything up in the roomiest backpack he could find, and turned to the remaining days of the week and weekend, determined to enjoy their mundane convention and shortening daylight hours as possible.
And on the following Monday, he created a new line on the map—one leading straight to its center.
He’d kept the backpack behind his house overnight, so that his mother wouldn’t see him switch his usual blue one for school with it. He boarded his bus as usual, but when it reached his school, he ducked around its front and ran straight into the edge of the woods there. He watched teachers and students alike as they milled about, a self-driven herd that slowly disappeared into the school. With the yellow vehicles blocking the building’s view of the woods, he pushed and stepped quickly through the brush, angling his way along the direction he’d memorized from the map, occasionally using his compass to keep his trajectory straight. At the brightest point of the day, where brilliant pillars of light stretched between the trees, he found the path—and then shortly later, he stood across the road from the house, staring at it with his jaw agape.
His current scrutiny was not out of his newfound perspective on the house’s position, its literal position, at the center of the mystery beneath his feet—but rather, that the car and the truck, along with the trio, were nowhere to be seen.
He knew he had to act now. He would have no way of knowing if they would be returning at some point sooner or later, and if he had to hide from them, he had to make use of what time he may have left in order to familiarize himself with the environment in order to do so.
He only then realized that he may have considered leaving a note for his mother—but then, given all his preparations, he had obviously, on some deep level, expected this journey to not be one that would take very long. After all, what else would—?
He felt a rumbling beneath his feet, and ducked back from the approaching car … but when none came and the vibrations continued, he felt his pulse kick up its pace. The ground itself was speaking, its prehistoric voice pronouncing foreign and unintelligible nonsense to Mose’s uneducated perceptions—but he knew all too well that it nonetheless was signaling what he already knew.
The path was winding down to its end. The circuits were closing. The pattern was finalizing.
Whatever was coming, it was coming very soon.
His pulse seeming to drum against the frame of his whole upper frame, Mose walked across the street, feeling the speaking ground fall silent. He walked up to the door and reached up, his hand balling into a fist, knuckles pointed forward—then he immediately lowered it, knowing that even if there were anyone inside to hear his inquiry, such a signal would be ill-advised.
Swallowing hard, he reached down and gripped the door’s rusted handle. Although any other time he would have wondered why it would be left unlocked, he was not surprised as it gave with ease under his turning hand, and he pushed the door open with a dull thump, slicing black between the wood panels before him and spreading it apart.
As he stepped inside, he wrinkled his nose at the moist, musky odor of soil that reached his nostrils. He glanced around, his eyes picking up shapes of sagging furniture and crooked picture frames on the walls. Closing the door behind him, he crouched and unslung his backpack—then paused when he saw what waited by his feet.
The long wooden handle caught his gaze first, its end terminating into the middle of a long, metal spike, one end of which was stained dark brown with mud—a pickaxe. He grinned slightly, proud to see his theory of the pattern was showing evidence of its actuality. But he would not be able to enjoy this success alone. He had to establish, once and for all, precisely what mystery lay beneath his town—and what possible threat it might pose.
He pulled on his gear, from overalls and boots to makeshift shoulder pads and helmet. He assembled the cane, which he’d pulled apart before loading it into the backpack, then finally removed one of the flashlights. He pointed its beam through a doorway ahead, where its light showed a trail of dirt leading into the darkened room beyond.
And taking a deep, shaky breath, Mose walked in deeper.
