The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [115]
“Not much older than us,” I said to Cal. I wondered if this Grayson had died of natural causes, or if something with teeth had come out of the mists. What was the life expectancy of my family? Not long, according to my father’s book.
Cal rattled the door of the single mausoleum, tilted to one side like the earth was a deck of a ship, and peered through the gap.
“Cal, don’t,” I said. “That’s grim.”
“It’s open,” he said, sticking his head inside despite my look of disapproval. “Oh, lighten up, Aoife. There’s no pine boxes in here, just one of those whaddyacallits. The Greek things.”
“Sarcophagus?” I rose and joined him at the narrow door.
“You always aced Greek,” Cal said. “I don’t understand what an engineer needs a dead language for.”
“Archimedes was Greek,” I pointed out. Cal ducked into the crypt and poked around behind the stone coffin. It was carved with mythological scenes, a weeping willow bending over a river, while a hooded figure poled the water. It looked similar to the Star Sister’s illuminations of the path to R’lyeh, their eternal land in the stars, but there were no spaceways or starships, just the boatman, the river and his burden of souls.
The stony waves on the river rippled before my eyes, and a throb went through my forehead, through my bones, through the healing shoggoth bite in my shoulder. I felt as if I’d tilted along with the sarcophagus and was falling, my mind compressing like it had when the owl attacked me in the library. The warning that something had made the world not right.
Not here, I thought, my heartbeat turning frantic. Not again. An attack of the Weird I couldn’t control wasn’t worse than no Weird at all. Who knew what would happen in this crypt, what traps existed? I could bring the whole thing down on me and Cal.
“There are stairs back here!” Cal’s shout yanked me back to the present, and the awful pressure on my bones and my brain faded away.
“Really?” I skirted the sarcophagus widely as I could, brushing against the stones of the crypt and trying to act as if I were merely scared of ghosts.
“They go way down.” Cal lowered himself into the small passageway. “Looks like the bootlegger tunnels, maybe. This could be where they stored the hooch.”
“They’d bury it in coffins during Prohibition,” I agreed. “But we shouldn’t, Cal.” The tomb felt too close, too cold. It reminded me too much of a madhouse cell.
“Oh, don’t be a goose,” he said, wriggling into the passage. “It’s daytime.” His head disappeared, and I looked back at the daylight in the door, which seemed impossibly far.
“Not underground, it’s not.”
Cal’s shout echoed from somewhere that sounded miles below. “Come on! It’s crazy down here, just like The Mummy or something!”
I huffed out a sigh. Cal was such a boy—show him something shiny, ancient or hidden and all rational thought flew out of his head. “Now who’s being a goose? Cal, come back here!”
No reply floated back to me, and I could hear Cal scuffling away in the passage below, lost to my shouting range.
I sat down and scooted until I could crouch and stand, descending the stairs after him. The passage was narrow, but light trickled in from somewhere above, and air breathed over my face as I wound deeper, down into the earth.
“Cal!” I caught up with him at a turn in the passage, where the earthen tunnel met a stone main, some long-forgotten artery for water running from the north, where the cider house sat, to the south, where at one time a dairy or barn would have had a cistern.
The water was gone now and only dust and the skeletons of rats and unlucky birds remained. I rubbed my arms, my gooseflesh not born from the cold air.
“This is great!” Cal’s face was flushed even in the low light. All of the lumpy planes of his face stood out in sharp relief, and his long slumped frame filled the low space of the tunnel. Cal cupped his hands and bellowed down the passage. “Hello!”
“This isn’t great, it’s silly,” I groused. Making Cal think the tunnel