Chapter Nine: Unforeseen Consequences

“We meet ‘neath the sounding rafter,

And the walls all around are bare;

As they shout back our peals of laughter

It seems that the dead are there.”

-Bartholomew Dowling, The Revel

 

            The control room looked much the same as it had when they left it. Prosser was still sitting his chair, his hands folded as though in prayer, his face lined with thought. All seemed quiet except for the clacking of keyboards and switches.

            A phone rang, and one of the technicians snatched it up diligently.

            “Control room,” he said before suddenly jerking the phone away from his ear with a revolted expression.

            “Oh, come on, Phil!” he said angrily into the mouthpiece. “I’ve told you a hundred times how disgusting that is! Finish whatever you’re eating and call back.”           

            And he slammed the receiver back down.

            A minute later, the lights flickered and went out.

            There was maybe half-a-second of silence, then everyone started talking at once.

            Prosser’s voice, soft though it was, cut through the gloom like a knife.

            “Report,” he snapped.

            “We’ve lost the main power generators!”

            “Everything’s dead, sir; it’s just gone…”

            “We’re completely blind, sir; we have no idea what’s happening…”     

            “Bring auxiliary power online now,” Prosser barked.

            “We’re trying sir, but it’s not responding…”

            “Radio contact?”

            “No response, sir.”

            “Start the emergency generator. Now!”

            There was the sound of someone stumbling across the room, the beam of a flashlight, and the door closing. Then silence for a few minutes.

            The lights flickered back on and the computers began to whir to life again.

            “Now bring the auxiliary power online.”

            “Yes sir, working on it…”

            It took maybe five minutes before someone announced “auxiliary power online, sir.”

            “Now report!”

            Silence.

            “Sir?” said a quavering voice. “The subjects…”

            “How many got out?”

            A pause.

            “All of them.”

            Every inch of Helen ached as though she had just been beaten. With a groan she sat up and looked around. There was nothing to see. It was all black.

            Like a knife, the thought cut through her that it was all over; she was dead.

            “No,” said a voice. “You’re not dead.”        

            She turned around. The great white Dog was standing behind her, smiling.

            “I’m not?” she said. “But then why is everything all black?”

            “You’re unconscious,” the Dog said matter-of-factly. “Being in a falling elevator will do that to you.”

            “Falling elevator?”

            “Yes, Python’s acid cut the cable. You fell about ten stories and are now at the very bottom of the facility; the regions that Prosser never bothered to use or repair.”

            “How’d I survive?”

            “The lower regions of the shaft were partially choked with debris. That slowed you down somewhat before you hit the bottom.”

            “Hendricks!” Helen exclaimed, remembering suddenly. “Is he…”

            “He’s fine,” said the Dog. “He’s trying to revive you as we speak.”

            Helen was relieved, but oddly embarrassed. It felt rude to stay unconscious when you knew someone was trying to wake you up. 

            “Well, I’m glad to see you,” she said. “But it, um, doesn’t look like I’ll be getting off Matoul any time soon.”

            “No,” he said. “It doesn’t. But you still have a chance. Now listen: not long after your escape, Python got into the generator room and ended up destroying the island’s main power source, as you just saw. The good news is that that means Prosser, Simon, and the others will be much too busy to worry about hunting you for the immediate future. The bad news is that this means that all the other monsters have gotten out of their cages and are roaming the facility.”

            “What!? You mean all those things are running around loose?”

            The Dog nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

            “I think the bad news is a bit…bigger than the good news in this case.”

            “You don’t have to worry about them just yet,” he said. “They’re still confined to the upper levels, and it will be some time before they find their way down here. Unfortunately, you need to find your way to the surface. Don’t bother looking for stairs; the staircases are almost all broken or blocked. And stay away from the elevator shafts, whatever you do!”

            “So, what else is there?” she asked.

            “Some of the ceilings have collapsed,” he said. “And, at the rate things are going, more will before long. If you’re careful and work together, you should be able to return to more habitable floors that way. But remember: the higher you go, the more likely it is you’ll run into guards or monsters, so go cautiously!”

            Helen shook her head wearily.

            “Okay,” she said. “I’ll do my best.”

            The Dog smiled at her.

            “Be brave, Helen. I’ll be with you all the way.”

            She managed to smile back.

            “Well, that’s something,” she said.

            “Very much so. You’re going to have to wake up now, but remember what I told you; head for the surface and stay away from the elevator shafts!” 

            The Dog vanished, and Helen became aware that someone was shaking her and calling her name. She also became aware that all the aches that she had been feeling suddenly became a lot worse. She groaned and clutched her head, which felt as though something inside were fighting to get out.

            “Oh, thank God!” gasped Hendricks. “Are you alright?”

            Helen opened her eyes. Hendricks was leaning over her with a cut lip and a lump on his forehead. A dim, flickering light was coming in through the elevator doors, which were jammed half-open at odd angles.

            “Looks like they got the power back on,” she muttered.

            “Uh, yeah,” said Hendricks, glancing out the door. “Was it off? I only just got up a minute ago…”

            “Yep. It turns out after he came after us, Python found his way into the power generator. That means all the other...things are running around loose.”

            “What?!”

            “I know. But don’t worry; we won’t run into any down here. But we still need to get off the island.”

            Hendricks nodded. “Right…uh, how do you know this?”

            “The Dog told me,” she said.

            “Ah, of course,” said Hendricks. Helen caught his tone.

            “Oh, come on!” her exclamation caused her head to throb even worse and she quickly lowered her voice. “You still don’t believe me?”

            “I didn’t say that!”

            “Hendricks, don’t patronize me,” she said. “I know what someone thinks I’m crazy; I can tell by the tone of your voice.”

            He gave an apologetic shrug.

            “It’s just…strange,” he said. “It’s hard to adjust to. I trust you, but I kind of have to keep reminding myself to, if you get me. Sorry, it’s the best I can do at the moment.”

            “Oh, well,” Helen said, massaging her aching head (the flickering light wasn’t doing her any favors). “We’ll work on it. In the meantime, we’ve got to start heading upwards.”

            “Toward the monsters?”

            “Yes. And towards the boats and helicopter.”

            “And the monsters?”

            “Yes.”

            “Okay, just, you know, so we’re clear.”

            He rose to a crouch and looked out the doors. A dim, cracked hallway stretched out into the gloom. It was both too long and too dark for them to see the far end. It was an unnerving sight.

            “Er, looks…all clear,” he said, glancing back at her. “Shall we get started then?”

            She nodded.

            “You don’t happen to still have your gun, do you?” she asked.

            He shook his head.

            “Well, we probably want some kind of weapon…”

            Hendricks looked around. There were a lot of jagged, torn off pieces of metal lying in and around the elevator. It didn’t take him very long to find one about three feet long and solid enough to feel like it would do some damage.

            “I guess this’ll have to do,” he said.

            And so, taking a deep breath, they stepped out of the elevator and into the darkened hallway. There were no doors here, only a few empty alcoves that might, at one time, had held fire extinguishers or other equipment. The hall ran about a hundred feet, turned a corner, and down a small flight of stairs to an identical hallway. This one was just as bare as the last; no doors, only vents hanging half-off their hinges and alcoves full of dirt and grime. There was a musty, moldy smell permeating the air; the kind of smell that comes with long neglect. It was completely silent, save for the flickering of the lights, the occasional scurrying of rats and roaches, and their own footsteps.

            And yet, Helen couldn’t help feeling an increasing sense of presence in these deep passages, as though someone were following them just out of earshot. At first she dismissed this as lingering fright over their recent close-calls, but rather than dissipating it increased as they went along. It was an oppressive, all-encompassing feeling, which deadened the mind and sapped the will, so that both Helen and Hendricks found themselves, despite their sedate pace, breathing heavily and sweating with exhaustion before they reached the end of the hallway. They felt as though they would have liked nothing better than to lay down and give up; not to sleep, or even to die, but just to not have to move or think.

            Helen shook herself violently, trying to get rid of the oppressive sensation. For a brief moment, her head seemed to clear, and she took the opportunity to grasp Hendricks’s hand. This seemed to revive him as well, and they quickened their pace, hoping to escape the shadow of dread that hung over them.

            At the end of the hall, they came to a T-junction and hesitated.

            “Left or right?” Hendricks asked. He couldn’t help whispering.

            “How should I know?” she hissed back.

            They stood there for a few minutes, peering down the two passages and trying to see something that would help them in their choice. But these seemed just as dim and featureless as the one they were in and offered no help whatsoever. They didn’t want to linger any longer, but they were both afraid of making a wrong move.

            “Do you have a coin?” Hendricks asked.

            Helen fished around in her pockets and produced a quarter.

            “Heads right, tails left,” she said and flipped it. Tails.

            “Left it is, then.”

            This way didn’t lead very long until it turned a corner and ran up a short flight of stairs. At the top, it ran straight for as far as they could see, but they began to feel better about their choice: here there were at least some doors.

            “Okay,” Helen said. “He, the Dog, said that we’d find a way up through the ceiling in one of these rooms…”

            “One of these?”

            “Well, some room,” she corrected herself. “But since these are the only ones we’ve found…”          

            Hendricks nodded. They tried the first door on their left, which was a big, heavy, metal door of the kind you find on ships. But it wouldn’t budge no matter how hard they pulled. Hendricks peered through the small, round window on the top.

            “Looks empty,” he said. “Let’s move on…”

            They tried the next door, but it was locked too. The third door, the first on their left, however, stood wide open.

            It was a large room; the corners piled high with unidentified junk. Rusting buckets, filthy old rags, empty bottles of some foul-smelling substances stood in heaps all around them. Their attention, however, was caught by a long metal shaft, thick with dust, running at a slant from near the floor all the way up to the ceiling.          

            “It looks like a laundry chute or something,” said Hendricks, squinting up the dust-and-cobweb filled shaft.

            He looked at Helen.

            “You know,” he said. “I think we might be able to climb up this. It looks big enough.”

            Helen eyed the rusty old chute uncertainly.

            “Is it safe?” she asked.

            “Well,” said Hendricks with a grimace. “I guess there’s only one way to find out…”

            “You mean by checking the bolts and testing its weight before we trust our lives to it?”

            “…Yes. Yes, that is exactly what I meant.”

            Helen looked as though she had just suppressed a laugh with some difficulty. Hendricks, feeling his face growing warm with embarrassment, busied himself by looking the shaft over.

            It seemed to be in surprisingly good condition. Bolts that held its suspending cables in place were rusted, but solid, as were the supports that held it up. Hendricks leaned on it and finally pushed all his weight down upon it, but it didn’t budge. He and Helen tried it together, but still it remained solid with little more than a slight groan.

            “Well,” he said after they had finished. “What do you think?”

            She bit her lip and looked up and down the chute.

            “I don’t know,” she said. “It looks fine, but the Dog seemed pretty specific that we’d find a caved-in ceiling and get up that way. This isn’t what I expected.”

            Hendricks tried to find a response that wouldn’t make her angry.

            “Maybe,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “He just meant that was the kind of thing you might use, not that it was the only way.”

            Helen seemed to consider this.

            “Maybe…” she said.

The fact was, she was just as eager as Hendricks to get out of this nether-region and its strange, deadening sense of watchfulness.

            “I mean, it leads upwards,” Hendricks went on. “I think it’s at least worth a try. And the longer we stay down here, the more likely it is that those…things will find their way down.”

             “I guess you’re right,” said Helen slowly. “Anyway, we can give it a shot.”

            “Great,” said Hendricks. “Uh, do you want to go first, or should I?”

            “You.”

            Hendricks nodded, tucked his metal club as securely as he could into his belt, and poked his head into the chute.

            It was very cramped, dark, and dusty. He braced his hands and feet against the side as it began to slope steeply upwards. In this way he slowly and very uncomfortably crept his way forward for about ten feet.

            “Okay!” he called back. “Start coming up!”

            A series of grunts and the noise of denting metal told him that Helen had begun her ascent. Hendricks resumed climbing.

It wasn’t long before he was terribly cramped, his arms were aching with tiredness, and his throat was scratchy and parched form all the dust he was breathing in. It was a perfectly miserable journey, and he couldn’t see any sign that it was going to end soon. Foot-by-foot, minute-by-minute, they climbed, the only thing keeping them going was the thought Just a little while longer, that’s all. We’ll find a way out soon. Just another few feet…

            “How’re you doing?” Hendricks called over his shoulder after about ten long-minutes’ climbing.

            Helen gave an inarticulate grunt that he could just construe as being positive.

            “Not much further…” he said (though he had no idea whether that was correct or not).

            As he pressed his hand against the side of the chute for what felt like the thousandth time, Hendricks felt something move across it. He gritted his teeth and tried to ignore it, but then it happened again. Then he felt it on his other hand. At the same time, he became aware of a faint rustling noise, like dead leaves being blown in the wind.

            He quickly took one hand away and shook it hard. When he placed it back something tough and filled with a sticky, warm goo cracked open beneath it…something alive.

            It was as though this had been a signal. Before Hendricks could even react in disgust or alarm to what had happened, the whole shaft was suddenly filled with a high-pitched whine. What felt like a hundred tweezers suddenly latched onto his hands and face as hard, whirring little bodies pelted him.

            Hendricks yelled in pain and horror and tried to back them away. This caused him to lose his grip and he slid backwards. He collided with Helen with a muffled shriek and together they slid all the way back down the laundry chute, skinning their hands painfully against the rough metal as they tried to arrest their descent.

            They shot out the bottom and hit the concrete floor in a painful heap. In the dim light Hendricks saw what the creatures still latched onto his flesh were.

            Cicadas.

            About half-a-dozen of the largest, ugliest cicadas he had ever seen. They were fat and a dark, nasty brown in color, which, combined with their foul odor gave them the revolting appearance of living feces.

            He started smashing them, spattering himself with their sticky, cream-colored innards, but as he did so he heard the same high-pitched whine coming from up the shaft and growing louder every second. They didn’t have time; the swarm was following them.

            “Come on!” he yelled, climbing to his feet and pulling Helen up after him.

            They ran out of the room and tried to slam the heavy door behind them. It wouldn’t budge.

            “Hinges are rusted solid!” Helen said, checking them. “We’ll have to try another one!

            She ran down the corridor. Hendricks hesitated just long enough to see the swarm of shrieking cicadas begin to erupt out of the laundry chute before following.

            The noise was incredible: apparently they had only been getting started in the chute, because now they were screaming like a jet engine as they flew after Helen and Hendricks.

            Helen, for her part, was trying every door down the hallway as she ran, tugging on them as she passed. None of them seemed willing to close. Hendricks thought his eardrums would soon burst with the noise, and even worse he felt some of the hideous things striking his back and trying to bite through his shirt.

            Finally, almost at the end of the corridor, Helen found a door that she could just barely move. Using it as a pivot, she swung herself into the room and started to tug the thing closed with all her might. She shouted something at Hendricks, but for all the good it had done he might as well have been deaf.

            Hendricks seized the door and swung himself in after her, pulling hard, and at last the heavy door swung shut with a clang.

            But several dozen cicadas had gotten in already. Hendricks slammed himself back against the wall, crushing most of the ones on his back. Whipping out his metal club, he swung it wildly, trying to swat them, but they were moving too fast. Looking around the room, he spotted a white cloth that had been flung over some equipment. Dropping his club, he seized the end and pulled it free, sending up an enormous cloud of dust. Coughing, Hendricks gathered up the sheet, tried to judge where the shrieking monsters were thickest, and threw it over them.

            To his slight surprise, it worked fairly well. The cicadas, at any rate, were not mutated to the point that they could lift the heavy cloth and it forced all the ones it had caught to the ground. Hendricks and Helen jumped onto it, stamping and pounding wherever they saw movement.

            Within about ten minutes, they had managed to catch, swat, and kill all the cicadas that had followed them in, including the ones that had hitched a ride still clinging to Hendricks’s hands. Exhausted, they flopped down against the wall, their ears still ringing from the terrible shrieks.

            “Cicadas!” Hendricks exclaimed, dabbing at his bleeding hands. “I don’t remember Prosser saying anything about cicadas!”

            “Maybe they were Nelson’s work,” Helen suggested, rubbing a lump on her temple from where she hit the floor coming out of the chute. “I mean, who else would look at a cicada and think ‘ooh! I can weaponize this! It’d be the perfect killing machine’!”

            “Well, anyway,” said Hendricks, sucking on a particularly deep cut. “I guess the laundry chute really was a bad idea; sorry.”

            “I forgive you for not foreseeing the possibility of a murderous cicada swarm.”  

            Hendricks laughed in spite of himself, but then he noticed something; something that looked like it didn’t belong in there.

            The sheet had not been covering old, fifties-era mechanical equipment as he had expected. At first he thought it was a body, but then he saw that it was, in fact, a statue made of grey stone and inlaid here and there with gold and precious gems. It was the figure of a bearded man stretched flat on his back. He was dressed in what appeared to be military garb, clasping a sword to his chest as though he were laid out for a funeral. His eyes were closed, and his face looked very wise and peaceful.

            Hendricks got up and went to take a closer look, Helen following him. The statue looked very old and very worn; though the features were still clear enough. The man’s figure rested on a large stone slab, on which was inscribed some writing. But when Hendricks bent over to look at it, he found it was in some strange script he couldn’t decipher.

            “Who is he?” Helen asked, peering into the man’s face.

            “No idea,” said Hendricks, straightening up. “Can’t read it…”

            Helen didn’t respond. She just kept gazing at the statue as though transfixed.

            “What is it?”

            She mouthed something silently. Then, very slowly, she reached out and touched the man’s face.

            The moment her fingers made contact with the stone, Helen became rigid. Her eyes shut tight, and her limbs began to tremble.

            “Helen?”

            She didn’t seem to hear him. Her mouth moved silently for a few seconds, then she spoke, but in a voice that wasn’t hers. It was very powerful, very deep, and very loud, and it spoke in a language which he couldn’t understand.

            Hendricks had no idea what to do. He wasn’t sure whether she was in pain or going mad, or what. Before he could make up his mind, Helen fell silent, withdrew her hand with a gasp, and staggered backwards.

            “Are you alright?” he asked, hurrying forward.

            She clutched a hand to her forehead, as though come over with a sudden migraine.

            “I had…a vision,” she said. “That’s never happened while I was awake before.”

            “What’d you see?”

            “I saw a battlefield,” she said, closing her eyes tightly and thinking. “It was snowing. There were a lot of men on horseback. Two of them had dismounted, and one was kneeling before the other, who was giving him…stuff. Maybe a sword; I couldn’t see it.”

            “Do you know who they were?”

            She shook her head.

            “No. I have the feeling I’ve seen one of them before somewhere, but…that doesn’t make sense, since it was in the middle ages or something.”

            “And what did….what you just said mean?” 

            Helen opened her eyes and stared at him.

            “I have no idea.”

            “But…you said it.”

            “No I didn’t,” she said.

            “Yes, you did. I was standing right here and heard you!”

            “It wasn’t me, though,” she said. “It was him, the guy giving away the sword. He said that when he was giving it to the other guy.”

            “And you don’t know what it means?”

            “No,” she said. “I don’t speak…whatever language that was.”

            Hendricks felt a chill run down his spine. Up until now, he hadn’t quite believed what Helen had said about being able to dream the future. What he had just seen and heard could only mean one of two things: either Helen had some bizarre mental illness that caused her to periodically freeze and declaim in a language she didn’t understand, or she really could do just what she said. It was a mark of how disturbing the supernatural is to those who actually encounter it for the first time that he found himself giving serious consideration to the former.

            To divert his thoughts from these uncomfortable regions, Hendricks looked down at the statue itself. But this, he found, led him into even darker and more troubling waters. The man appeared to be wise, handsome, and kindly, but there was something unnatural about his presence here. How had such a statue, weathered with age, bearing the inscription of some strange hand, come to be here, at the very bottom of this island? Who had brought it here, and to what purpose? And why had it been left here when the island was abandoned? For he felt certain that Prosser knew nothing of this man, if, indeed, Prosser had ever come down to these levels at all.    

            But it was more than just the mystery of the thing. There was an eerie feeling accompanying that statue, a feeling that grew stronger the longer he looked at it. It was the inarticulate dread that he remembered feeling as a child whenever he passed a graveyard, or entered a very old church. Age, solemnity, unspoken awe and fears that defied expression were caught up in it; the sense of touching the boundaries of a deeper and more mysterious world.

            “Hendricks,” said Helen quietly.

            He looked at her. She was watching the statue as well, apparently caught in the same sense of eeriness as he.

            “It’s a tomb.”

            The monosyllable seemed to intensify all his dread tenfold. Of course. A tomb. How could it be anything else?

            “What is it doing here?” he was not surprised to find himself whispering.

            “I think…” she crouched down to look at the inscription on the side of the tomb. “I have a guess,” she said. “My guess is that he was a Russian…an aristocrat. His family must have been afraid his tomb would be plundered during the Revolution and managed to ship it out somehow.”

            “To here?”

            Helen shook her head.

            “I doubt it,” she said. “But I don’t know. That’s all I can guess.”            

            She shivered.

            “Can we get out of here?”   

            Hendricks would have liked nothing better. The only trouble was that, once they started to look around, they couldn’t see any very obvious way out, apart from the door they had come in through, and where the murderous cicada swarm presumably still lurked. The room, it transpired, was largely empty except for the mysterious tomb. A few half-rotted wooden boxes (empty except for a little straw) stood piled haphazardly into a corner, but that was about it.

            “Um…”

            The first faint glow of panic was beginning to creep into Hendricks’s mind. If they couldn’t find a way out, then they would be faced with the alternative of waiting there to starve to death next to that mysterious tomb (the presence of which seemed to grow more and not less unbearable the longer they stayed there) or of being eaten alive by a swarm of mutant cicadas. At the moment he wasn’t entirely sure which he thought was worse.

            “Any ideas?” Helen asked after about five minutes of looking over the bare walls and rummaging through the empty boxes.

            He shook his head. “You?”

            “Several,” she said. “But none that would be any help.”

            Hendricks stopped in the middle of the room and rubbed the back of his neck nervously, looking up and down, trying to think of something. There was the door, there was the tomb. The ceiling was completely solid, and the floor….wasn’t. There was a large drain, half-covered by the tomb.

            “Over here…”

            He pointed it out to Helen.

            “Thank God!” she exclaimed, then her face fell.

            “Uh, but how are we going to get into it?”

            Hendricks looked at her and grimaced.

            “I guess…we move him,” he said.

            Helen gave him a horrified look.

            “I am not touching that thing again,” she said, backing away as though she thought the statue might get up at any minute.

            “Why not?”

            She looked as him as though he had just asked her why she didn’t want to touch a hot stove.

            “You’ve never had a vision before,” she said. “It’s not a comfortable experience!”

            Hendricks was a little alarmed by this revelation, but he also thought she needed to be more realistic.

            “Well, do you have any other suggestions?”

            Helen bit her lip, looking nervously at the tomb.

            “Could you just…try to move it yourself?”

            Hendricks couldn’t believe his ears.

            “Helen, it’ll be a miracle if we can move it together; there’s no way I can do it myself.”

            “Could at least try?” she asked. “Please?”

            She looked so honestly distressed that Hendricks felt he couldn’t refuse. Somewhat nervously (as he wasn’t entirely sure that it wouldn’t give him a painful vision), he put his hands to the tomb’s edge, braced himself, and pushed with all his might.

            For all the good it did, he might as well have tried to push the wall out. He strained and pushed for a minute or two without budging it before giving up and slumping over the stone form of the dead man.

            Gasping for breath, he looked up at Helen and shook his head.

            “Oh, alright,” she said. Walking as though she were approaching a live rattlesnake, she sidled up next to him and held her hands about an inch away from the tomb’s edge.

            “What are you…”

            “I don’t want to touch it any more than I have to,” she said sharply. 

            “Alright, ready?” said Hendricks bracing himself again and pressing his own hands firmly against the tomb. “One, two, three!”

            They both pushed. Helen showed no immediate signs of mental anguish as she strained and grunted next to him and slowly, very slowly, the heavy stone artifice began to slide along the floor, bit by bit revealing the drain that was their escape route.

            “Just…a little…more…” Hendricks grunted as the edge of the drain appeared.

            Helen suddenly leapt back with a scream as though she had been burned.  She clutched her forehead, her face contorted with pain, and collapsed. Hendricks lunged to catch her before she hit her head on the concrete floor.

            “What? What is it?”

            Helen only groaned with pain, gripping her head with both hands. The fit lasted maybe ten seconds before she relaxed, breathing deeply.

            “That…was even worse,” she gasped.

            “What’d you see?”

            “A lot,” she said, brushing her sweat-drenched hair out of her eyes. “Too much. Blood, pain, hatred….It was all a blur. The only clear thing was the feeling of a big knife going through my forehead.”

            Hendricks shuddered.

            “Are you alright?”

            “More or less,” she said. “Anyway, I don’t think it was meant for me at all. I think I was seeing someone else’s life.” She cast a nervous glance at the tomb. “Maybe that’s what happened to him.”

            Hendricks glanced over the statue for a second, then back at her.

            “Are you okay to move on?”

            She rubbed her forehead and tried to get her breath back.

            “Just give me a second,” she said. She heaved a deep breath. “Okay, I think I’m ready. But I’m really glad I’m usually asleep when that happens. I never realized how…how nasty that is.” She grimaced, shook her head, and stood up.

            “You sure you’re alright?” he asked.         

            “Good enough,” she said. “Let’s see if we can get through here.”

            Hendricks picked up the metal bar (since it was the only tool they had) and started to work on the screws attaching the vent cover to the floor. It was very awkward and the bar kept slipping out, but he managed it at last. They lifted the vent off and looked down into the pit. It was utterly black and they couldn’t tell how far down it went. A smell of rot and decay wafted up the shaft. Hendricks felt with the bar, but couldn’t find the bottom. He picked up one of the screws (which he had carefully set aside out of habit) and dropped it in. They heard it plunk into water a short way down.

            Hendricks looked at Helen.

            “If you say ‘ladies first,’ I’m going to hit you,” she said. 

Next Week: 

Chapter Ten: Eyes in the Dark