Thicker Than Blood - the Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy - Blake Crouch [167]
I saw Luther take something off this wall.
Horace shined the flashlight around the perimeter of the door. To the right of the doorframe, a shiny key hung from a nail.
He jammed it into the deadbolt.
The door swung inward and a cold dank draft swept up out of the darkness and enveloped him.
He smelled stone and water, mold and earth, as though he stood at the entrance to a cave. Though he’d yet to cut the darkness with his flashlight, there was no question in his mind that this door led to someplace underneath the House of Kite.
And the hair on his arms stood erect and some primal siren sounded in his brain, but mistaking terror for adrenaline, he walked down into the darkness because he’d never felt more alive.
54
HORACE kept the beam of the flashlight trained on the rickety steps. They creaked as though God Himself were standing on them—twenty-two in all—and it grew colder the farther down he went so that his breath was pluming again by the time he reached the bottom, a dusty vapor in the lightbeam.
At last Horace stood on a dirt floor.
He shined the flashlight back up the staircase. The door at the top felt miles away.
The basement lay in pure silence and blackness. Horace imagined sitting at a table in the Ocracoke Coffee Company the following morning, near a window with the early sun streaming in. He would write this scene over coffee. It would be amazing. It would be safe.
Horace swiped the beam in a slow circle to gain his bearings.
What he saw unnerved him—doorways into nothing, stone passageways, shoddy wiring snaking up the walls. He shivered, stepped back from the steps, and shined the flashlight down the widest passageway, one that ran behind the staircase into seemingly infinite darkness.
It occurred to him that a person would have to be mad to enter that tunnel, and for a moment, he strongly considered heading back up the steps, through the kitchen, into the moonlit yard. The comfort of his bed at the Harper Castle B&B seemed more enticing than ever but he steeled himself, gripped the flashlight, and proceeded into the passageway.
He progressed slowly, letting the beam graze every surface.
The corridor appeared to narrow the deeper he went.
Horace passed a doorway, shined a light through it. In the brief illumination, he glimpsed a big oak chair in the throes of construction, dripping with wires and leather restraints.
He lost his breath, leaned against the wall to get it back.
When the sound of his own panting subsided, he listened.
Water dripped somewhere in the distance, beyond the ellipse of light.
He heard something move behind him, spun around with the flashlight.
There was nothing there but the sound repeated.
When the beam hit the floor he saw the fat rat sitting on its haunches staring at him, eyes glowing like luminescent beads.
It scampered back toward the stairs and Horace moved on in the opposite direction, the passageway now turning and branching and turning again, passing through alcoves and various rooms—one with a low ceiling, filled with empty wine racks, another with the burned and splintered remains of a bed frame. There lingered a foreboding, a dread attending these rooms and tunnels. Horace could feel it. Awful things had happened here.
He approached yet another corner, disorientation setting in. The basement seemed to extend beyond the boundaries of the house and he doubted whether he could readily find his way back to the stairs.
At the corner he stopped, shined his flashlight through the next fifteen feet of passageway.
An icy drop of water splashed in his hair.
He glanced up.
Another landed on his nose.
Horace wiped his face, moved on.
A moment later he arrived at a fork in the passageway.
He stopped, looked back in the direction he’d come, trying to recall the turns he’d taken, resolved now to find his way back to the stairs and leave this place.
He heard something,